Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
Jakob von Gunten
Jakob von Gunten | Robert Walser
8 posts | 13 read | 4 to read
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.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
review
sisilia
Jakob von Gunten | Robert Walser
post image
Pickpick

3⭐️ Based on Walser‘s personal experience, this is a fictitious diary of a young man from a rich family who enrolled himself into a school for servants. It gets odd in the middle when Jakob shares his weird dreams, and I‘ve never truly enjoyed a story where reality and dream blend together 😞Jakob‘s mix of arrogance and humility somehow reminds me of Uriah Heep (from David Copperfield)😂 …minus the writhing, of course.

review
booksforlife83
Jakob von Gunten | Robert Walser
post image
Pickpick

Jakob Von Gunten is a student at the Benjamenta Institute where students are taught to serve and “stay small“. Written like whimsical thoughts and observations on life with ambiguities and philosophical ramblings, this is a brilliant book that stands alone in its style of prose. It is a must read!

quote
Christoffer
Jakob von Gunten | Robert Walser
post image

The innocent audacity of the narrator‘s attitude makes me want to equate it to rightness. This is the genius of Walser.

review
fmcgeough
Jakob von Gunten | Robert Walser
post image
Pickpick

‪Finished first book in #24in48 @24in48readathon really good. Reminded me of Kafka. ‬plus there was a delicious lager with lunch. Bells Brewery Lager of the Lakes.