The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.
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"As a literary character, Jakob von Gunten is without precedent. In the pleasure he takes in picking away at himself he has something of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and, behind him, of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of theConfessions. But—as Walser’s first French translator, Marthe Robert, pointed out—there is in Jakob, too, something of the hero of the traditional German folk tale, of the lad who braves the castle of the giant and triumphs against all odds. Franz Kafka, early in his career, admired Walser’s work (Max Brod records with what delight Kafka would read Walser’s humorous sketches aloud). Barnabas and Jeremias, Surveyor K.’s demonically obstructive “assistants” in The Castle, have Jakob as their prototype." -- J.M. Coetzee
Wonderful . . . eccentric.
— The New York Sun
The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination…. Walser’s virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.
— Susan Sontag
If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place.
— Hermann Hesse
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
Original Language: German
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More About the Author
Robert Walser (1878-1956) worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic in 1933 and institutionalized for the rest of his life, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand stories.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jakov von Gunten is not like any novel I have read before and not, despite all the comparisons, like any novel of Kafka's. It is more like a series of first person reflections, with only the repeating cast of characters and the narrator to hold the novel together. Kafka's novels all have a certain narrative drive, and here there is very little, although the story of the slow dissolution of the school is strangely moving.
Bernard van Dieren once wrote that every original mind is a cosmos in itself: Walser gains nothing from being continually advertised as Kafka-lite. He is his own writer. By any standard, he is not as great a writer as Kafka, but his outlook is much more genial - less insular and more human - despite the fact that Walser and not Kafka was the one who ended up in the insane asylum. This book is his long masterpiece. The episodic rambling quality of the novel betrays Walser's roots in the short story, but the material never feels scattershot or forced together.
Something Jakob says gets at what Walser might be trying to do - he's writing about the hair of the students in the school: "And because we all look so charmingly barbered and parted, we all look alike, which would be a huge joke for any writer, for example, if he came on a visit to study us in our glory and littleness. This writer had better stay at home. Writers are just windbags who only want to study, make pictures and observations. To live is what matters, then the observation happens of its own accord."
A strange thought for someone writing in a diary! But maybe the diary form is the closest that any writer can come to approximating the feeling of life, and letting the reader make his or her own observations. Walser does seem to have a certain distrust of the intellect, but he is not a naive, untutored talent; what he sees, though, is the limitations of intellect, which is perhaps his closest relationship with Kafka - "One is always wrong when one takes up with big words," he writes, and produces a masterpiece using all small ones.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
By sweetmolly
Format:Paperback
Jacob is a young man attending a bizarre school to train servants (butlers) for upper class families. We are never certain if it is the school that is so odd or Jacob. He decides the other teachers "either do not exist, of they are still asleep, or they seem to have forgotten their profession" for the teaching responsibilities are taken solely by Herr Benjamenta or his dying sister Fraulein Benamenta.
This slim novel is Jacob's soliloquy to us. He is charming, buoyant, perhaps mad, and never intimidated. He reflects upon himself, his fellow students, his family and the Benjamentas with interest, sympathy, and occasional sadness.
Even when Jacob is frightened (rarely), he is intrigued and fascinated at what is happening to and around him, as when he incurs the ire of Herr Benjamenta:
"I'm writing this in a hurry. I'm trembling all over. There are lights dancing and flickering before my eyes. Something terrible has happened, seems to have happened, I hardly know what it was. Herr Benjamenta has had a fit and tried to-strangle me. Is this true? I can't think straight; I can't say what happened is true. But I'm so upset it must be true-"
I ended this novel very fond of Jacob. I know I will find him unforgettable. I believe the translation must be very good as the prose is fluid with Jacob's idiosyncrasies of speech intact. Highly recommended.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Fans of Kafka, Pessoa, or any of the alienated, little-man-behind-a-desk anti-heros of 20c. lit should grab this one. Set in a school for servants, and taking the form of a diary, this is a funny, touching, yadda yadda, joy to read. People who prefer shorter fiction should pick up Walser's short stories, which at times out-Kafka Kafka (Franz K. was a fan though a bit too constipated and egotistical to freely admit it). Walser is one of those tragically overlooked, quiet, humble writers who can change your life. Fascintating reading, fascinating writer. Very few compare to Walser at his best.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
NICE!
I bought this book as a gift for a friend of mine. I highly recommend it!! I have never read it in English though I knew the book in italian. It's a gem.
dark. insightful. Read more
dark. insightful. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Di Bucchianico Maria El
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mrs. Quoad's Meggezone
Happiness serves and Walser returns in this strangely compelling and utterly subversive novel--despite its modest ways and means this is almost certainly the literary equivalent of... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Noddy Box
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jakob Gives Holden a Good Name
It is popular in some modern reading circles to criticize J.D. Salinger's famous protagonist from THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, Holden Caulfield. Read more
Published on July 22, 2010 by Ken C.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Irresistible book
Irresistible book. This has to be the most charming fictional novel written in the 20th century. Or ever in human history. Am I being overblown? See for yourself! Read more
Published on February 8, 2010 by Dan Mash
4.0 out of 5 stars
am i crazy? or is he?
you know how sometimes you hear a crazy person and you think to yourself that some of what they're saying sounds like genius, before it returns to raving lunacy? Read more
Published on March 25, 2009 by wordtron
5.0 out of 5 stars
If Beckett had the aesthetic of a child
Susan Sontag compares Robert Walser to a more whimsical Samuel Beckett, and after reading this it became clear why. Read more
Published on October 31, 2008 by Ian Gazarek
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comical melancholy from a prose poet and wordsmith
Jakob is a student at a Berlin institution that seems to train young men for employment as servants or butlers (Kazuo I. must have read this before he did the Remains of the Day). Read more
Published on May 26, 2008 by H. Schneider
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Eccentric, Kafkaesque Novel Written Before Kafka
In 1910, Franz Kafka began writing his journals. This was one year after the publication in Germany of Robert Walser's eccentric little novel, "Jakob von Gunten". Read more
Published on April 29, 2002 by "botatoe"
5.0 out of 5 stars
indeed
Any true lover of literature will love Walser. The only complaint that can possibly be made is the poor paper quality of this edition of this book. The publisher should re-print.
Published on March 31, 2002
5.0 out of 5 stars
Walser's prose is tragically beautiful
This is my second book (after Masquerade...) and am eagerly waiting for his third 'The robber' to be delivered. Read more
Published on June 23, 2001 by Muhammad Asad Khan
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