Quarry, The [Unabridged] [Mass Market Paperback]

Friedrich Duerrenmatt (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 127 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; First Thus edition (1961)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0000CLH7U
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,886,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mystery with more at stake than whodunit..., December 11, 2008

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Quarry. (Hardcover)

I havent yet read a Durrenmatt book that wasn't brilliant essential reading--and this one is no exception.

Barlach is a Swiss police commissioner--shortly to be retired--recovering from an operation meant to delay his inevitably terminal cancer. By chance, he spots a photo in one of the magazines he's reading to pass the time of a notorious Nazi war criminal--a doctor who operated on his concentration camp victims without anesthesia. Barlach becomes convinced that this doctor--under an assumed identity--is running an expensive clinic for the wealthy right there in Berne. So--still confined to bed--Barlach investigates the only way he's able; by having himself transferred to the clinic as a patient under an assumed name.

What follows is strictly out of a Kafkaesque nightmare as Barlach confronts not only the horrifying truth past and present but the very essence of evil in the person of the doctor and his staff from hell.

The novel is very short (proving conclusively that author's with something important to say don't have to take 700 pages to say it) and there's really no doubt that the doctor is, indeed, the Nazi Barlach suspects. There is some suspense as to whether Barlach will escape--and, if so, how. But even this uncertainty evaporates when Durrenmatt telegraphs the ending with a single line about twenty-five pages from the conclusion.

The fact is, however, that Durrenmatt hasn't really intended to write either a whodunit or a suspense thriller. He has staged this little drama to bring together the forces of good and evil for an apocalyptic debate upon which the fate of man depends. Does he live for anything beyond himself? Does nihilism trump all values, all purpose in the end? Is life just a meaningless game in which only the losers play by the rules?

Durrenmatt doesn't answer these questions so much as put forth the most forceful and intelligent arguments for each position. In the final analysis, he leaves the final analysis to you, the reader--judge, executioner, and, alas, the condemned, too.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Quarry, a.k.a., Suspicion (Der Verdacht), May 24, 2008

By 

Cooper 'n me (USA) - See all my reviews

Police chief inspector Baerlach has just undergone surgery when his friend and doctor, Hugentobler, thinks he recognizes one of his own colleagues on a LIFE Magazine picture about Dr. Neyle, a nazi doctor who practiced surgery without anaesthesia in the extermination camps. This Dr. Neyle could be now the eminent owner of a private clinic for wealthy people in Zurich, Switzerland. Baerlach asks his friend Hugentobler to transfer him in that clinic under a false name. How will Baerlach, who is too weak to leave his bed, be able to unmask the evil doctor ?

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, born in 1921 and died in 1990, is one of Switzerland's most important contemporary writers; in fact, he is perhaps the most important (and successful) German-language playwright....after world war II.