'I try on stories like clothes,' says the narrator of ["Gantenbein"] …, now reissued with its English title changed from 'A Wilderness of Mirrors.' In this rather more engaging replay of the 'identity mystery' secreted in 'I'm Not Stiller,' two different identities and two life-stories are invented for a dead stranger. He could have been Gantenbein, who pretends to be blind, or Enderlin, who is having an affair with Gantenbein's wife—or possibly both gentlemen are having an affair with the wife of Svoboda.

Versions and variations proliferate: one female character starts as an actress and is recast as a contessa; another is a manicurist who declines into a call-girl (found strangled with a cord). Frisch touches explicitly on his obsession, his speciality, when the narrator confesses that he too often feels that any book not concerned with preventing war or creating a better society is...