Robert Walser

Professor and Chair of Musicology Robert Walser

Jakob von Gunten is a student at a school which teaches how to become servants and butlers.

A Novel

Jakob Von Gunten

Evan

They were alive, and now it's as if they've been stolen away from me. Bare reality: what a crook it sometimes is. It steals things, and afterwards it has no idea what to do with them. It just seems to spread sorrow for fun. Of course, I like sorrow very much as well, it's very valuable, very. It shapes one.

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.

Jakob von Gunten

Not a very fun read, but somewhat amusing at times.

"Jakob von Gunten" reads like the journal entries of a boy during his time at a school teaching boys to become servants or butlers. Jakob, our narrator, is pretty annoying and he is very aware of it. His thoughts are often aimless ramblings that are unrealistically verbose for a teenager, though plot-wise this can be explained away by his upbringing in a wealthy family, I guess.

Personally, I found his babbling largely to be pestering. Again, Jakob knows of his ability to annoy and revels in it, often attempting to enrage his fellow trainees and principal. Jakob doesn't have any real goals for this entire book other than to philosophize with himself (and, infrequently, others) and talk about his life and life in general. Lots and lots of aimless thoughts.

So why 3 stars? Robert Walser definitely had a talent for the written word. While I found Jakob -- the character -- to be lousy, there's no denying that the writing style is unique and somewhat flowery in a tasteful way. His talent is on display in many ways, just not in creating a world nor characters I really want to explore for most of this "story". Stripped of the context, I think there is a lot of poetry in this book.

Towards the end, say the last 15%, the book becomes much more interesting in terms of a plot and I finally began to enjoy some of the long-windedness some voices in this world had. A character gives a speech that, for the first time reading the book, finally had me hooked. Again: it's just poetic writing, but at this point it is also finally combined with a plot going somewhere. "A reason to care" had been missing for me until the end.

This last 15% or so bumped this up from 2 stars to 3 for me. I'm not exactly super happy I stuck around to see it through, but there's no denying that it ramps up and ends well enough -- it certainly got better and I want to give that credit.

I do not recommend "Jakob von Gunten", but I did enjoy its end. Perhaps Walser has some other works out there for me, but this was a poor start (which sucks, as this is hailed as his best).

Not a very fun read, but somewhat amusing at times.

  

"Jakob von Gunten" reads like the journal entries of a boy during his time at a school teaching boys to become servants or butlers. Jakob, our narrator, is pretty annoying and he is very aware of it. His thoughts are often aimless ramblings that are unrealistically verbose for a teenager, though plot-wise this can be explained away by his upbringing in a wealthy family, I guess.

Personally, I found his babbling largely to be pestering. Again, Jakob knows of his ability to annoy and revels in it, often attempting to enrage his fellow trainees and principal. Jakob doesn't have any real goals for this entire book other than to philosophize with himself (and, infrequently, others) and talk about his life and life in general. Lots and lots of aimless thoughts.

  

So why 3 stars? Robert Walser definitely had a talent for the written word. While I found Jakob -- the character -- to be lousy, there's no denying that the writing style is unique and somewhat flowery in a tasteful way. His talent is on display in many ways, just not in creating a world nor characters I really want to explore for most of this "story". Stripped of the context, I think there is a lot of poetry in this book.

Towards the end, say the last 15%, the book becomes much more interesting in terms of a plot and I finally began to enjoy some of the long-windedness some voices in this world had. A character gives a speech that, for the first time reading the book, finally had me hooked. Again: it's just poetic writing, but at this point it is also finally combined with a plot going somewhere. "A reason to care" had been missing for me until the end.

This last 15% or so bumped this up from 2 stars to 3 for me. I'm not exactly super happy I stuck around to see it through, but there's no denying that it ramps up and ends well enough -- it certainly got better and I want to give that credit.

  

I do not recommend "Jakob von Gunten", but I did enjoy its end. Perhaps Walser has some other works out there for me, but this was a poor start (which sucks, as this is hailed as his best).

Reading this felt like strolling down a doorless path (quiet, isolated, and oddly peaceful). You won't "relate" to Jakob as a character, but in some ways, his longing to become nothing makes him more present than any ambitious character out there, like someone dreaming and awake. Cool but confusing.

Gokhan Danabas

Molly M

«Aquí se aprende muy poco, falta personal docente y nosotros, los muchachos del Instituto Benjamenta, jamás llegaremos a nada, es decir que el día de mañana seremos todos gente muy modesta y subordinada. La enseñanza que nos imparten consiste básicamente en inculcarnos paciencia y obediencia, dos cualidades que prometen escaso o ningún éxito. Éxitos interiores, eso sí. Pero ¿qué ventaja se obtiene de ellos? ¿A quién dan de comer las conquistas interiores?» Así empieza Jakob von Gunten, la tercera novela de Robert Walser, la más amada por el autor, pero también la más discutida e innovadora, escrita en 1909 en Berlín, tres años después de haber dejado el Instituto donde se había educado. Y el gran protagonista de esta «historia singularmente delicada», según un juicio de Walter Benjamin, es el propio Instituto Benjamenta: el alumno Jakob, a través de su diario, nos introduce en todos sus secretos, en sus dramas y pequeñas tragedias y en todos sus misterios, convirtiéndolo en uno de los escenarios más memorables de la literatura del siglo XX.

Jakob Von Gunten A Novel

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