Mein Name sei Gantenbein

Mein Name sei Gantenbein, the third novel written by M. Frisch, published in 1964. It is the most baffling of the three, yet probably the most widely read. Underlying the novel is Frisch's distrust of words and especially metaphors. This novel is intended as an illustration of the difficulty of communication by means of words and simultaneously as a demonstration of Frisch's virtuosity in their employment. It has no plot, but many incidents. The first-person narrator conceals three separate identities: Theo Gantenbein himself, Felix Enderlin, and Frantisek Svoboda. All three are related to one person, Lila. Gantenbein is her second husband, Enderlin her lover, Svoboda her first husband. The book consists of episodes in the lives of these, mostly related in the present tense, in words which the author intends us to perceive as an arbitrary convention, while the speaker uses them because the actual episode is incommunicable by words. It is frequently spoken of as a treatment of the problem of identity, but more important is Frisch's sense of existence in terms of transience, what he calls our perpetual awareness, not of time, but of what he calls ‘Vergängnis’, and the banal concluding words ‘ich lebe gern’ express an unpretentious existentialism.