SOURCE: "Crimes of the Mind," in New Republic, Vol. 200, June 5, 1989, pp. 39-41.

In the following review, Birkerts looks at the mind games and plot twists which Dürrenmatt has placed in The Execution of Justice and The Assignment.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt is best known on these shores as one of Switzerland's two world-class playwrights, the other being Max Frisch. Both came to prominence after World War II, tilling the then-fertile soil of European malaise. Both filtered an existential pessimism into refined, often paradoxical investigations of good and evil, guilt and accountability. Politically neutral, culturally Germanized, the status of these Swiss writers seemed to mandate that ambiguity of thought and deed should be their proper subject. Dürrenmatt's two best-known plays, The Visit and The Physicists, reconnoiter precisely this terrain.

But Dürrenmatt, like Frisch, also turned his hand early on to novels, and to non-fiction prose of various...