Kurt Vonnegut reviewed the book for
The New York Times in 1965. Vonnegut compared Dürrenmatt's stories to Swiss clockworks, and wrote that the author "is a fascinating, endearing maker of clocks. He chooses to write this way, invented this way of writing. The puzzle is: He seems to be attacking something brilliantly, but what is it?" Vonnegut wrote: "His jokes are
Jungian jokes, it seems to me--private,
Kraut, mythological. And, while he seems to protest against the absurdities of modern times, he doesn't care enough about them to learn much about them. What we have here is an elegant exploration of a Jungian dream." ==Film adaptation==