num_pages: 176
description: Librarian's Note: this is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 0940322218 (ISBN13: 9780940322219).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 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 his 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 records his quirky impressions of the school as well as his own quickly changing enthusiasms and uncertainties, deliberations and dreams. And in the end, as the Institute itself dissolves around him like a dream, he steps out boldly to explore still-unimagined worlds.
language: English
title: Jakob von Gunten
titlecomplete: Jakob von Gunten
characters: Jakob von Gunten, Herr Benjamenta
genres: Fiction, 20th Century, Classics, German Literature, European Literature, Germany, Literary Fiction, Literature, Short Stories, Novels
ratings_count: 5081
publisher: New York Review Books Classics