Few contemporary writers have attacked the traditional borders between fiction and nonfiction more systematically than Max Frisch…. "Montauk," and two sets of diaries, "Sketchbook 1946–1949" and "Sketchbook 1966–1971,"… rebel against the tyranny of genre more vigorously than any contemporary work I can think of. (p. 3)

Mr. Frisch's literary mosaics could have become a mere hodgepodge in the hands of a lesser artist, and yet, few works I know prove the increasing irrelevance of distinctions between literary genres. The power and consistency of the writer's sensibility—that of a very sophisticated, concerned, acerbic Western liberal probing the conscience of our time—binds his disparate styles into a powerfully unified structure. They are like metal filings kept in perfect order by an unseen magnet, held together by an order of energy not unlike that which unites Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's disparate aphoristic jottings….

Mr. Frisch's novels differ from the mainstream of post-war Existentialism...