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Title: Jakob Von Gunten (New York Review Books Classics) by Robert Walser, Christopher Middleton ISBN: 0-940322-21-8 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.7 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A strange wonderful book
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: a literary standard textbook as RIDDLE
Comment: a new look into the cruelty of life from back before KAFKA,CASTLE black. robert walser account of alienation ,attendence MANDATORY salute of innanities feltand caste About within four walls of societys tombs of CERTIFIEDEXACTNESS. WHAT THE NARrATOR ;self professed NAIF. feels , within the Halls of absurdity[Servility]; a travelog of the mind ,in the guise of a journal. Author takeS on what is more real servilTY verses power. WAHT WINS OUT, stumble about in collisions Clear in bafflLin BLasts in winds CURRENTS. .. sway WAYdown cyrpto tomb HOLLOWhalls of FOLLY hails ofNAILS volley ;insight into salutes of iGNORANCE MaSSed as the [INSTITUTE] .THE aNOMONOUS mOments add up to INDIFFRENCE ... THE JOURNAL takes place within these confines,[CONFESSIONS] with no gravitude NOr WEIGHT , NO RhYME NOR REASEN,... LESSONS,.certifiedwithin the asylum walls, BIT at odds a summary in collision THE SPECTACLE OF A VACANT REASONING TEXTBOOK HUMILIATING LESSONSABSOR ABHORED EXPLORED; EXAMINATIONS OF RIDDLES ,seMMing RANDOM PUZZLES ,CONDITIONED.... a school FOR, restrictions implied/APPLIED...,[ by ones own guilt] symboColided in opposites , a turned up outsidein, meanderin replY in a LIEjournalWIthin too SEEK relief within TREASEN. CANT OR WONT , conditioned or learned BAFFLEMENT..., so construct your own textbook in JACOBS JOURNAL TO INSTRUCT .
Rating: 4
Summary: An Eccentric, Kafkaesque Novel Written Before Kafka
Comment: 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". The fact is worth noting because Kafka had read Walser and liked his writing, writing which can be characterized as "Kafkaesque" even though it preceded the publication of Kafka's work by several years. The resemblances between Walser and Kafka-- in sensibility, in prose style, in eccentricity of thought and syntax--are remarkable.
"Jakob von Gunten" is the first person journal of a student at the Benjamenta Institute, a school for butlers in an unidentified city. In young Jakob's words, "one learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys of the Benjamenta Institute will come to anything, that is we shall all be something very small and subordinate later in life."
The Institute is run by Herr Benjamenta and all classes are taught by his sister, Fraulein Lisa Benajamenta. There are no other teachers, all of the others being either "asleep, or they are dead, or seemingly dead, or they are fossilized." It is a narrowly circumscribed world full of students who are enchanted with the most mundane and trivial matters. But it is also a mysterious world, a world alienated from reality, a dreamlike projection of Jakob's mind expressed in the concrete language of the real. "The Benjamentas are secluded in the inner chambers and in the classroom there's an emptiness, an emptiness that almost sickens one."
Humorous and absurd, disturbing and, at times, childlike in its simplicity, "Jakob von Gunten" is the work of an undeservedly obscure master of modern prose. Thus, Christopher Middleton, the translator, in his fascinating and useful introduction, describes Walser as "in significant ways untutored, something of a primitive." More precisely, Middleton notes that Walser's prose "can display the essential luminous naivete of an artist who creates as if self-reflection were not a barred door but a bridge of light to the real." It is, in other words, prose which seeks to rewrite the "real" in the distorted image of the narrator's mind, making simple descriptions of mundane experience absurd. It is Kafkaesque writing before the advent of Kafka, a diminutive precursor of the Master of Prague.
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Title: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics) by Robert Walser, Susan Sontag, Christopher Middleton ISBN: 0940322986 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Robber by Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky ISBN: 0803298099 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Masquerade and Other Stories by Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky ISBN: 0801839777 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1990 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, Celina Wieniewski ISBN: 0140186255 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Boredom (New York Review Book, No 8) by Alberto Moravia, Angus Davidson, William Weaver ISBN: 0940322285 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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