["Bluebeard"] shows Frisch to be in dazzling command of his meticulous literary powers. The hero is a hapless Don Juan named Herr Doktor Schaad. We meet him in the aftermath of a spectacular trial in which he has been accused of strangling a Zurich prostitute—his sixth wife. Acquitted by the jury, Schaad persists in trying himself in the courtroom of his conscience. Therein lies the drama in this laconic little fable about guilt and innocence in an Age of Bureaucracy.

Through a sequence of terse flashbacks we relive Schaad's ordeal. A long parade of witnesses—secretaries, psychiatrists, ex-wives—offer conflicting testimony. Depending on the speaker, the doctor appears meek, harmless, ill-tempered, tight-lipped, humorless, hypersensitive, a selfless philanthropist, an alcoholic philanderer. The prosecutor bullies him into rehearsing his dreams and confiding that perhaps he was jealously protective of his wives. Evidence gathered from his own private notebooks makes...