The year 2011 marks both the 20th anniversary of the death of the Swiss author Max Frisch, on 4 April 1991, and the 100th anniversary of his birth, on 15 May 1911. I only discovered this by chance when I recently read his beautiful novella Man in the Holocene, published in German in 1979 and in an English translation by Geoffrey Skelton in 1980.

The misleading cover of Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene (Champaign: Dalkey Archive , 2007).

The Dalkey Archive edition has a misleading picture on the cover: this is not a book about a young man or woman walking or jogging in a flat and misty landscape under a huge milky whitish sky.