The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

Max Frisch (1911-1991) Swiss novelist, playwright, diarist, and essayist, who began his career as an architect before achieving fame with the play When the War Was Over in 1949. His most famous novels are Stiller (1954) and Homo Faber (1957).