Homo Faber

The protagonist of the book is Walter Faber, a middle-class UNESCO engineer who thinks the universe is logical and measured. Strange occurrences threaten his sense of security. He makes an impossible emergency landing in the Mexican desert, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the forest, he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, and he engages in an incestuous relationship. Finally, stomach cancer strikes Faber, but it is too late for him to make any changes to his course of action.

Originally published in 1951, Homo Faber is an examination of the scientific outlook on human mental evolution. The book aims to undermine what its terms, the 'scientific outlook' and the preconceived scientific concepts that reality does not extend beyond our senses.

A man who strives for pure rationality and control finds himself at the mercy of fate, in a “novel that speaks tellingly of loneliness, love, and despair” (Booklist). Walter Faber, engineer, is a man for whom only the tangible, calculable, verifiable exists. He is devoted to the service of a purely technological world. His associates have nicknamed him Homo Faber—“Man the Maker.” But during a flight to South America, Faber succumbs to what he calls “fatigue phenomena,” losing touch with reality—and soon he finds himself crisscrossing the globe, from New York to France to Italy to Greece. He also finds himself in the company of a woman who—for reasons he cannot explain or understand—strongly attracts him. The basis for the film Voyager starring Sam Shepard, this novel “capture[s] that essential anguish of modern man which we find in the best of Camus” (Saturday Review). Translated by Michael Bullock

The New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative—all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination’s power to forge a zone outside of time’s intractable hold.

The protagonist of the book is Walter Faber, a middle-class UNESCO engineer who thinks the universe is logical and measured. Strange occurrences threaten his sense of security. He makes an impossible emergency landing in the Mexican desert, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the forest, he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, and he engages in an incestuous relationship. Finally, stomach cancer strikes Faber, but it is too late for him to make any changes to his course of action.

Walter Faber is an emotionally detached engineer forced by a string of coincidences to embark on a journey through his past. The basis for director Volker Schl ndorff' s movie Voyager. Translated by Michael Bullock. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Why do people work hard, and take pride in what they do? This book, a philosophically-minded enquiry into practical activity of many different kinds past and present, is about what happens when people try to do a good job. It asks us to think about the true meaning of skill in the 'skills society' and argues that pure competition is a poor way to achieve quality work. Sennett suggests, instead, that there is a craftsman in every human being, which can sometimes be enormously motivating and inspiring - and can also in other circumstances make individuals obsessive and frustrated. The Craftsman shows how history has drawn fault-lines between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory, and that individuals' pride in their work, as well as modern society in general, suffers from these historical divisions. But the past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working (using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials) which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents. We need to recognise this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible.

"A luminous parable . . . A masterpiece." The New York Times