Novel
Jakob von Gunten
Robert Walser · 1909
Synopsis
Jakob von Gunten, the son of a good family, flees the shadow of an overbearing father and enters the Benjamenta Institute of his own free will, a school for servants in a large city where masters are almost never seen. Miss Lisa Benjamenta teaches the class; her brother, the director, counts his money in his office. There is only one textbook and one lesson, on how a boy should behave. Jakob keeps a diary of this education in humility, observes his classmates and, with his self-assurance, unsettles the two Benjamentas.
Context
Walser had attended a school for servants in 1905, then served the following winter as a valet at the castle of Dambrau, in Upper Silesia. The novel, the third he wrote in Berlin, appeared in 1909 from Bruno Cassirer. Kafka owned a copy and thought it a good book; J. M. Coetzee sees in Jakob the model for two characters in The Castle. Marthe Robert translated it into French in 1960, Christopher Middleton into English in 1969.
Who it is for
A short novel, in the form of a diary; it asks the reader to accept a prose that advances by detours and dwells on very little.
Prizes and reception
Ranked in 2008 by the Süddeutsche Zeitung among the hundred great novels of the twentieth century.