"I have been serving up stories to some sort of public, and in these stories I have, I know, laid myself bare—to the point of non-recognition."

So Frisch writes in "Montauk" (1975), a novel-like account of a weekend spent among the sand dunes with an American girlfriend and a golden opportunity for some confessional writing, which, however, never comes. Frisch is always impersonal, never more so than when he writes about himself. That his novels and his plays often seem the work of two different men makes him all the harder to get hold of.

His plays (such as the frequently produced "Andorra," 1961, and "The Firebugs," 1958), although various in subject matter all have about them something of the political parable in the Brechtian manner. Each has its moral, in the sense that the problem it poses, in theory at least, is capable of solution. The problem is some...