Max Frisch · 1957 · global

Max Frisch's 1957 novel, subtitled A Report. Walter Faber is a Swiss engineer for UNESCO who believes in probability, machinery and nothing else - and in the spring of 1957 a chain of coincidences he would call statistically impossible carries him from a forced landing in the Mexican desert to a hospital bed in Athens, by way of a girl he meets on a ship.

1. 1
   New York

   Faber leaves New York in April 1957 for Caracas and a job installing turbines, having just ended things with Ivy - a man of fifty who has arranged his life so that nothing can arrive in it that he has not calculated for.

2. 2
   Tamaulipas

   The Super-Constellation loses an engine and puts down in the Mexican desert, and the passengers wait days among the zopilotes - and the German in the next seat proves to be the brother of Joachim, unseen since 1936.

3. 3
   Guatemala

   Faber breaks his journey to go with Herbert through Palenque and the forest to Joachim's tobacco plantation - and they find him hanged in his hut. Herbert stays on to run the place, and does not come out again.

4. 4
   New York

   Back in New York, Faber does something uncharacteristic and books an ocean passage to Europe rather than a flight - and on deck meets a girl of twenty with a reddish pony-tail whom he begins by calling, in his mind, the child.

5. 5
   Le Havre

   The crossing is the hinge of the book. Faber plays ping-pong and chess with Sabeth, proposes marriage to her on the last morning half in earnest, and disembarks in France having decided to see her again in Paris.

6. 6
   Paris

   At the Louvre he waits for her among the sculptures, and the conference he came for gets less of his attention than it should - and neither of them yet knows that her mother is Hanna, or what that makes them to each other.

7. 7
   Avignon

   They drive south together, and at Avignon on 13 May there is an eclipse of the moon, which Faber explains to her as a matter of shadows and orbits - and that night, for the first time, they are not travelling as strangers.

8. 8
   Rome

   Through Italy by car - Pisa, Florence, the Via Appia - the engineer being shown around museums by a girl who knows the names of things he has never looked at, and finding he does not mind being the one who is taught.

9. 9
   Acrocorinth

   They sleep out under the citadel at Acrocorinth, and next morning on the beach at Theodohori a snake bites her - and Faber, running for help, does not know she has also struck her head on the stones as she fell.

10. 10
    Athens

    At the hospital in Athens the mother arrives and it is Hanna, and the arithmetic is unavoidable: Sabeth is his daughter. The snakebite is treated. Nobody tells the doctor about her head, and she dies the following afternoon.

11. 11
    Caracas

    He goes on to Venezuela to install the turbines and cannot manage it, laid up in a hotel with the stomach pain he keeps not seeing a doctor about - and there begins writing the report that is the first half of this book.

12. 12
    Havana

    Four days in Havana, where he stops calculating and simply looks at people - the one stretch of the novel in which Faber is happy, and which he records with the bewilderment of a man who has no theory to cover it.

13. 13
    Zurich

    By way of a film screening in Dusseldorf and a train south, he reaches Zurich and Professor O., who does not pretend the diagnosis is anything other than what it is.

14. 14
    Athens

    He returns to Athens and to Hanna, and goes into hospital for the operation on his stomach - writing the second half of the report in a hand that gets smaller, and the last entry stops mid-thought.