Zurich Transit

Sketch of a Film

Max Frisch

Translated by Birgit Schreyer Duarte

 

5 x 8.5 inches, 82pp. December 2010

ISBN : 9781906497637

Rs  225.00 (PB)
$19.00 (PB)
£14.95 (PB)

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The screenplay Zurich Transit was developed from an episode in the novel Gantenbein, published in 1964: ‘A story for Camilla: of a man who decides several times to change his life but, of course, never succeeds . . .’ Yet one day he, Theo Ehrismann, returns from a trip abroad and reads in the paper his own obituary. He arrives just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, especially not to his wife: ‘How does one say that he is alive?’ Max Frisch counters the traditional dramaturgy based on causality with a dramaturgy of coincidence.

 

‘Life,’ Max Frisch said in 1965, ‘is the sum of events that happen by chance, and it always could as well have turned out differently; there is not a single action or omission that does not allow for variables in the future.’ 

Max Frisch (1911–91), was one of the giants of twentieth-century literature, achieving fame as a novelist, playwright, diarist, and essayist. His works include Andorra, I’m Not Stiller, A Wilderness of Mirrors, and Man in the Holocene.

 

Birgit Schreyer Duarte is a freelance dramaturge, theatre director, and translator. She has also translated works by Pascal Mercier and Roland Schimmelpfennig.

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