Who's Who

I'M NOT STILLER (363 pp.)--Max Frisch--Abelard-Schuman ($4.50).

It was a U.S. passport, issued in the name of Sam White by the American consul in Mexico City. The customs officer at the Swiss border seized it and said abruptly to Sam: "Come with me." "My train will be leaving any minute,'' protested Sam. "Is there something wrong with my passport?" But the official handed him over to an inspector of police, who began firing absurd questions at him: "You have a wife living in Paris. Is that right?" "So you yourself are a sculptor ... Is that right?" Before long, Sam, a bachelor and no sculptor, realized that he was in a nasty hole--a victim of mistaken identity.

Shut up in a neat, clean prison cell (expressive of hygienic Swiss democracy). Sam tries to keep a cool head. He learns that he is taken for a Swiss named Anatol Ludwig Stiller, who disappeared six years ago. Stiller, it seems, callously abandoned his wife, Ballet Dancer Julika, when she was half dead with tuberculosis; he also left unpaid debts and broke Swiss law by failing, as a reservist, to ask the authorities for permission to leave the country. "I'm not Stiller!" Sam keeps shouting. But after Stiller's old conscript's uniform, much moth-eaten, is tried on Sam for size and found baggy, he is told: "You've grown thinner."

Rose-Hip Jam. The patient, democratic Swiss provide Sam with a defense counsel, who drops in every day for a little chat and begs Sam to own up to being Stiller. And soon. Stiller's wife, who is "convinced that she knows her husband better than he knows himself," arrives at the prison and "recognizes" Sam immediately. Julika is a beauty, with hair "red, like rosehip jam," and the authorities encourage Sam to take long walks with her and reminisce about "their" married life. Since Julika is just Sam's type, he soon finds himself making love to her--and thinking what an ass Stiller was to leave her for another woman.

As the weeks pass, Sam learns all there is to learn about Stiller. He sees Stiller's old studio and pieces of sculpture, meets Stiller's friends and relations. He even meets the woman whom Stiller ran away with: she is the wife of the lawyer who has been chosen to prosecute him.

At this halfway point, the reader begins to see clearly what Swiss Novelist Frisch is up to, i.e., a sort of Franz Kafka's Castle in reverse. In the Kafka fable, the modern hero struggled to gain entry into an official world that denied his existence; in I'm Not Stiller, he struggles to deny the existence that the same world imposes on him. And, as in The Castle, the setting and characters in I'm Not Stiller may be understood symbolically as well as really. Sam's "prison" is his own fear. The "border" at which he is arrested divides fantasy from reality. The "prosecuting counsel" is the accusing finger of a wronged husband; the "defense counsel" is the part of Sam that longs to be at peace with the world.

Ingenious Blend. But can Sam be proved to be Stiller? That is the question--and it is one that has always intrigued the theologians and philosophers who have delved into the problem of personal identity. "Good Swiss commonsense" knows that "Sam White" is the fiction of a desperate man who is determined to escape not only from his past but from the self by which he is known to others. But the Stiller beneath the Sam is equally sure that there is much more in him than others can perceive: by running away to the New World and becoming "another" person, he has asserted his right to mature into "a different man." But if Stiller and "Swiss commonsense" are both right, who is Stiller? "Who is misrepresenting whom?"

Author Frisch's solution is an ingenious blend of religion and psychology. He argues his case with subtlety and a nice sense of drama (he is a playwright as well as a novelist). The only difficulty readers will find in his book is that it starts off with the bang of a whodunit and then tails off into the world of Germanic near mysticism. I'm Not Stiller is already a European bestseller and has been hailed as a masterpiece; perhaps it is more accurate to describe it as the first novel since World War II that has tried to exploit the rich, mixed inheritance handed down by Kafka, Koestler and Mann.

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