Jakob von Gunten
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The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of 20th-century literature. Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest in his range of short stories, essays, and novels. This novel reveals a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humour, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of an Henri Rousseau painting.
About this Author
Robert Walser left school at 14 and led a wandering and precarious existence while publishing poems, essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he entered an insane asylum, where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," he said, "but to be mad."
Reviews
"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
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