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When his plane crash-lands in the Mexican desert, Walter Faber experiences the first of several remarkable coincidences that lead him almost unconsciously on a personal journey into his past. Faber is a truly dedicated technologist-engineer: he distrusts emotions and believes only in the calculable. Yet it is by a series of totally incalculable events that he encounters a lost friend, a former lover, and a daughter he has never known, until gradually he is caught in a tragedy of starkly classical horror. Ranging from New York to the sweating jungles of Guatemala, and from Dusseldorf to the ruins of Corinthm he is moved relentlessly along a path towards illumination, fulfilment, and destruction.

Homo Faber penetrates deeply into the soul of modern man, who arrogantly assumes the superiority of his own handiwork over nature's. But this common attitude often masks an ingrained self-distrust, a sense of inadequacy, and alientation from one's deepest and most genuine feelings. A recurring theme in Frisch's writing is man's need to rediscover his past, derive self-knowledge, and atone for his failings. Caught by the fate they have prepared for themselves, his characters discover their own existence in a "sphere where the comic and the tragic meet". And Frisch, as one critic has remarked, "is one of the rare writers who can show both at once".