Jakob von Gunten [Paperback]

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.

"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.