Summary Homo Faber
Max Frish
Homo Faber
The events unfold in 1957. Walter Faber, a fifty-year-old engineer of Swiss descent, works at UNESCO and is engaged in setting up production equipment in industrially backward countries. At work he has to travel often. He flies from New York to Caracas, but his plane due to malfunctions in the engine is forced to make an emergency landing in Mexico, in the Tamaulipas desert.
For those four days that Faber spends along with the rest of the passengers in the scorching desert, he approaches the German Herbert Henke, who flies to his brother, the manager of the Henke-Bosch tobacco plantation, in Guatemala. In conversation, it suddenly turns out that Herbert’s brother is none other than Joachim Henke, a close friend of the youth of Walter Faber, whom he had not heard about for about twenty years.
Before the Second World War, in the mid-thirties, Faber met a girl named Gunn. In those years they were connected by a strong feeling, they were
Herbert reports that after the departure of Faber, Joachim married Gann and a child was born to them. However, a few years later they divorced. Faber makes some calculations and comes to the conclusion that the child born to them is not his. Faber decides to join Herbert and visit his longtime friend in Guatemala.
After a two-week journey to the plantation, Herbert and Walter Faber learn that a few days before their arrival, Joachim hanged himself. They betray his body to the ground, Faber leaves back to Caracas, and Herbert remains on the plantation and instead of his brother becomes its manager.
Aboard the ship, Faber meets a young red-haired girl. After studying at Yale University, Sabet (or Elisabeth-so-called girl) returns to her mother in Athens. She plans to get to Paris, and then hitchhiking around Europe and finish her trip to Greece.
On the boat, Faber and Sabet communicate a lot and, despite the great age difference, a feeling of affection arises between them, which later grows into love. Faber even suggests Sabet to marry him, although he did not previously think of associating his life with any woman. Sabet does not take his proposals seriously, and after the arrival of the ship to the port they part.
In Paris, they accidentally meet again, visit the opera, and Faber decides to accompany Sabet on a trip to the south of Europe and thereby save her from the possible unpleasant accidents associated with hitchhiking. They call in Pisa, Florence, Siena, Rome, Assisi. Despite the fact that Sabet drags Faber through all the museums and historical sights, to which he is not a hunter, Walter Faber is happy. He had an unknown feeling before. Meanwhile, from time to time, he has unpleasant sensations in the stomach. At first this phenomenon almost does not bother him.
Faber is unable to explain to himself why after meeting Sabet, looking at her, he increasingly begins to recall Ganna, although there is no apparent external similarity between them. Sabet often tells Walter about his mother. From the conversation that took place between them at the end of their journey, it turns out that Hannah is the mother of Elisabeth Pieper (the surname of Hannah’s second husband). Walter gradually begins to guess that Sabet is his daughter, the child he did not want to have twenty years ago.
Not far from Athens, on the last day of their journey, Sabet, lying on the sand near the sea, while Faber is floating fifty meters from the shore, the snake stings. She gets up, goes forward and, falling from the slope, hits her head against the rocks. When Walter runs up to Sabet, she is already unconscious. He brings it to the highway and first on a cart, and then on a truck delivers the girl to a hospital in Athens. There he meets with a slightly older, but still beautiful and intelligent Hannah. She invites him to her house, where she lives alone with her daughter, and almost all the night long they tell each other about those twenty years that they have spent separately.
The next day they together go to the hospital to Sabet, where they are informed that the injection of serum taken on time has borne fruit and the girl’s life is out of danger. Then they go to the sea to collect Walter’s things, which he left there the day before. Walter is already thinking about finding a job in Greece and living with Hannah.
On the way back, they buy flowers, return to the hospital, where they are informed that their daughter died, but not from a snake bite, but from a fracture of the base of the skull that occurred at the time of the fall on the stony slope and was not diagnosed. With the right diagnosis, it would not be difficult to save it with surgical intervention.
After the death of his daughter Faber for some time flies to New York, then to Caracas, calls on a plantation to Herbert. In the two months since their last meeting, Herbert has lost all interest in life, has changed very much both internally and externally.
After visiting the plantation, he again calls in Caracas, but can not take part in the installation of equipment, because because of severe pain in the stomach is forced to spend all this time in the hospital.
Passing from Caracas to Lisbon, Faber is in Cuba. He admires the beauty and open temper of Cubans. In Düsseldorf, he visits the management board of the Henke-Bosch company and wants to demonstrate to the management his film about Joachim’s death and the state of affairs on the plantation. The coils with the films have not been signed yet (there are many of them, since he does not part with his camera), and during the show, every now and then he finds films with Sabet, causing sweet and bitter memories, instead of the necessary fragments.
Having reached Athens, Faber goes to the hospital for a checkup, where he is left until the operation. He understands that he has stomach cancer, but now he wants to live like never before. Hannah was able to forgive Walter for his twice-ruined life. She regularly visits him at the hospital. Gunn tells Walter that she sold her apartment and was going to leave Greece forever to live a year on the islands where life is cheaper. However, at the last moment she realized how pointless her departure was, and got off the ship. She lives in a boarding school, she does not work at the institute any more, because when she was going to leave, she quit, and her assistant took her place and voluntarily does not intend to leave him. Now she works as a guide in the archaeological museum, as well as the Acropolis and Sounion.
Hannah always asks Walter why Joachim hanged himself, tells him about his life with Joachim, about why their marriage broke up. When her daughter was born, she did not resemble Hannah Faber, it was only her child. She loved Joachim precisely because he was not the father of her child. Hanna is convinced that Sabet would never have come into the world, if they had not parted with Walter. After Faber left for Baghdad, Hannah realized that she wanted to have a child alone, without a father. When the girl grew older, the relationship between Hannah and Joachim began to get complicated, because Hannah considered herself the last resort in all matters relating to the girl. He more and more dreamed of a common child who would restore the position of the head of the family to him. Ganna was going to go with him to Canada or Australia, but, being a half-Jewish German, did not want to produce children anymore. She made herself an operation of sterilization. This accelerated their divorce.
After parting with Joachim, she wandered with her child across Europe, worked in different places: in publishing houses, on radio. Nothing seemed difficult to her, if it was a daughter. However, she did not spoil her, for this Gunna was too smart.
It was quite difficult for her to let Sabet alone travel, even for only a few months. She always knew that one day her daughter would leave her home, but she could not even foresee that on this journey Sabet would meet her father, who would destroy everything.
Before Walter Faber taken to the operation, she with tears asks him for forgiveness. He wants to live most of all in the world, for existence was filled with new meaning for him. Alas, it’s too late. With the operation he is no longer fated to return.
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