SOURCE: Shipe, Timothy. “Montauk: The Invention of Max Frisch.” Critique 22, no. 3 (1981): 55-70.

In the following essay, Shipe asserts that “the real subject of Montauk is how autobiographical material came to be transformed into a work of fiction.”

Montauk (1976) is a work which invites its own misreading. Frisch seems to declare his intentions in the clearest possible fashion: Montauk is to be a work of pure autobiography, a factual account of the weekend the sixty-three-year-old Swiss writer spent on Long Island with an American woman half his age. There will be not a touch of fictionalizing, and the work will be free of the narrative complexities of novels like Stiller (1954) and Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964): “I should like to describe this day, just this day, our weekend together, how it came about and how it develops. I should like to tell it without inventing anything. In the role of...