["Sketchbook 1946–1949"] is not a hotchpotch of things and persons seen or of random ponderings but a coherent narrative, an ingenious mosaic. The fragments hold together as the portrait of a sensitive moralist responding to the chaos in Europe in the years immediately following the Second World War; they also reveal the artist's eager greed for people and what is behind their faces. One is really reading two men at once. Frisch may be a travelling conscience, shocked by what he sees and reporting it all, but he is also at his business of imagining. So that, in a sense, the "Sketchbook" is an incipient and earnest Bildungsroman, quick-witted and vivid. Every anecdote may have its bearing on some play or story he thinks of writing….

[The people Frisch describes] will reappear in the "Sketchbook" from time to time, transfigured. Indeed, the image of the forester will turn up...