Word: stiller
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...STILLER (363 pp.)-Max Frisch-Abelard-Schuman...
Shut up in a neat, clean prison cell (expressive of hygienic Swiss democracy). Sam tries to keep a cool head. He learns that he is taken for a Swiss named Anatol Ludwig Stiller, who disappeared six years ago. Stiller, it seems, callously abandoned his wife, Ballet Dancer Julika, when she was half dead with tuberculosis; he also left unpaid debts and broke Swiss law by failing, as a reservist, to ask the authorities for permission to leave the country. "I'm not Stiller!" Sam keeps shouting. But after Stiller's old conscript's uniform, much moth-eaten...
Rose-Hip Jam. The patient, democratic Swiss provide Sam with a defense counsel, who drops in every day for a little chat and begs Sam to own up to being Stiller. And soon. Stiller's wife, who is "convinced that she knows her husband better than he knows himself," arrives at the prison and "recognizes" Sam immediately. Julika is a beauty, with hair "red, like rosehip jam," and the authorities encourage Sam to take long walks with her and reminisce about "their" married life. Since Julika is just Sam's type, he soon finds himself making love...
...weeks pass, Sam learns all there is to learn about Stiller. He sees Stiller's old studio and pieces of sculpture, meets Stiller's friends and relations. He even meets the woman whom Stiller ran away with: she is the wife of the lawyer who has been chosen to prosecute...
...point, the reader begins to see clearly what Swiss Novelist Frisch is up to, i.e., a sort of Franz Kafka's Castle in reverse. In the Kafka fable, the modern hero struggled to gain entry into an official world that denied his existence; in I'm Not Stiller, he struggles to deny the existence that the same world imposes on him. And, as in The Castle, the setting and characters in I'm Not Stiller may be understood symbolically as well as really. Sam's "prison" is his own fear. The "border" at which...