The precision-minded Swiss have never been famous for grand gesture or passionate utterance. It is as if exposure to the mighty contours of the land has over generations pruned back the national soul and turned its energies inward….

Out of this mountain fastness comes novelist, dramatist, and perennial Nobel candidate Max Frisch …, whose career has been one long assault upon repression, self-satisfaction, and bourgeois right-mindedness. Frisch—the Swiss who would not be Swiss—has done everything in his power to throw off the burden of his heritage. In the forty years since he quit architecture for writing, he has expressed himself with great inventiveness upon a single theme: the near-impossibility of living truthfully. He determined early on that the will to self-deception acts on the character as powerfully and almost as inevitably as gravity acts on the body. From his first major novel, I'm Not Stiller …, right up...