"Man in the Holocene" is a short, experimental novella written in German by Swiss author Max Frisch. My edition is 111 pages in the English translation. This includes several pages that are inserts of scientific and technical information that the narrator refers to in the work.
The book describes the life of Geiser, an elderly Swiss man living alone in an isolated location. A widower, and in poor health, Geiser looks at the world around him from a scientific perspective, with the title referring to the great amount of time that the world exists and man's relatively small role in the history of time. There are (mostly outdated) snippets of scientific information that are inserted in the text from scientific works.
I actually bought this book in the first place because when I go to book stores sometimes I am self-conscious about purchasing only Star Trek novels, and on the outside chance that the clerk has an encyclopedic memory of the literary tastes of their customers, I like to also buy something suitably literary. And this book was cheap. Other than that, I don't know if I was too inspired by it, since it seemed to be another work about the smallness of man in the face of the greatness of nature, etcetera. In short, what I refer to as Dimestore Existentialism. Perhaps someone with a greater knowledge and appreciation of the course of Swiss literature could find other things in it, but it left me fairly underwhelmed.