Montauk (novel)

Also, the story is about the emergence of Montauk: in contrast to his previous work Frisch describes his decision to document this weekend's direct experience without adding anything.

On their last weekend Lynn and Frisch come closer together and take a trip to Long Island, New York, to the village of Montauk on the Atlantic coast.

Frisch is dissatisfied with his stories, which he merely wrote serving the audience, but concealed large parts of his own life, and downright betrayed himself.

Lynn triggers memories of her predecessors, starting with the Jewish Käte, the real model of Hanna from Homo faber, Frisch's second wife Marianne who lives separately from him (but whom he still loves), to the relationship with Ingeborg Bachmann shaped by dependency and jealousy.

Shortened only is the name of his friend of youth W., the art collector Werner Coninx, whose collection is now presented in the Coninx-Museum [de].

Some critics stressed that it would be a misunderstanding to read Montauk a kind of key narrative to understand his live and work.

Some see the Max Frisch from Montauk, however, as an "art piece", whose desires finally did not produce sincerity but a beautiful story.

The question of truth and falsehood is made a subject of discussion in Montauk itself, as the story abruptly jumps from He– to I–form: "He looks, to check whether his tenderness really refers to Lynn ... Or lie I here?"

After Frisch researched in vain at a following U.S. tour for that young woman, she herself called the author after the release of the American translation of Montauk in the summer of 1976.