Rain has been falling for nearly a week in the Swiss canton of Ticino as Max Frisch's short, fragmentary and deeply disturbing novel [Man in the Holocene] opens…. Whatever the truth may be (and truth—as opposed to fact—is elusive through most of the book)…. It is a time for turning in upon oneself, for cultivating in isolation the grim disciplines of survival.

Frisch's hero, Geiser, is an old man, living alone on an Alpine slope….

When [Geiser] has a stroke and dies, the reader is relieved at the novel's two final pages which give reassurance that life otherwise goes on as before.

But if he is a microcosm, Geiser is also a clearly delineated individual—a bit fussy and literal-minded but quite amiable and, at the beginning of the novel, obviously intelligent and capable. Frisch tells his story as Geiser might tell it himself, in a...