A young man’s flight into the Alps on the eve of his wedding
What the Work Is
An Answer from the Silence: A Story from the Mountains (German: Antwort aus der Stille: Eine Erzählung aus den Bergen) is a long narrative work by the Swiss writer Max Frisch, first published in 1937. It is an early work, written before the plays and novels that established Frisch’s reputation, and it tells the story of a young man who escapes to the Swiss Alps shortly before his wedding.
What the Book Is About
The book’s central situation is a flight and a delay: a young man, on the threshold of marriage, leaves the life waiting for him and retreats into the mountains. The book follows this withdrawal and what it means for a person to step away from a commitment already made. The title points toward the idea that something — an answer, a clarity, a decision — may be found in silence and solitude rather than in the noise of ordinary life.
Significance and Influence
The book’s later history is unusual. Frisch came to regard this early work as something he did not wish to stand behind: he refused to allow it into his collected works in the 1970s. A review in Publishers Weekly in 2011, marking the book’s belated appearance in English translation by Mike Mitchell, described it as an earnest and unusual book and judged it a pity that it had been denied to readers for so long. The same review characterized the book as infused with a post–World War I despair about the human condition.
