"Man in the Holocene" strikes me as just about perfect according to its austere terms: "Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. [The protagonist] Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory." (p. 322)

The hallucinatory power of "Man in the Holocene" derives not only from the spare prose but from the blank spaces, to indicate discontinuities of thought, and from the photographic reproductions, in various typefaces, of the slips of paper and the paragraphs from the encyclopedias. Everything we know is leaving us, without our permission. Why did the dinosaurs disappear? When did words begin?

This, then, is senility. Does Max Frisch feel as bad as Samuel Beckett? Not really. The odd triumph of this very short novel is its humanism, its resistance. We are transitory and we are amateurs and the lizards will outlast us, but we can remember our brothers and certain...