Robert Walser, Christopher Middleton (INT) Jakob Von Gunten

Annotation

The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of th e quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, and four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. It tells the story of a seventeen-year-old runaway from an old family who enrolls in a school for servants. The Institute, run by the domineering Herr Benjamenta and h is beautiful but ailing sister, is a deeply mysterious place: the faculty lies asleep in a single room; the students, though subject to fierce discipline, come and go at will. Jakob, an irrepressibly subversive presence, keeps a journal in which he recor ds his quirky impressions of the school, as well as his own quickly changing enthusi asms and uncertainties, deliberations and dreams. And in the end, as the Institute i tself dissolves around him like a dream, he steps out boldly to explore still-unimag ined worlds.