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    Jakob von Gunten
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    Jakob von Gunten
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    Jakob von Gunten
    Ebook150 pages3 hours

    Jakob von Gunten

    By Robert Walser

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    «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.
    LanguageEspañol
    PublisherSiruela
    Release dateFeb 16, 2012
    ISBN9788498419238
    Unavailable
    Jakob von Gunten
    Author

    Robert Walser

    Robert Walser es uno de los más importantes escritores en lengua alemana del siglo XX. Nació en Biel (Suiza) en 1878 y publicó quince libros. Murió mientras paseaba un día de Navidad de 1956 cerca del manicomio de Herisau, donde había pasado los últimos años de su vida. Siruela  ha publicado también el libro de conversaciones Paseos con Robert Walser, de Carl Seelig y Robert Walser. Una biografía literaria, de Jürg Amann.

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    Reviews for Jakob von Gunten

    4/5

    264 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A great, unique literary voice
    • 3/5
      One day I shall be laid low by a stroke, and then everything, all these confusions, this longing, this unknowing, all this, the gratitude and ingratitude, this telling lies and self-deception, this thinking that one knows and yet never knowing anything, will come to an end. But I want to live, no matter what.

      (I am numb towards this novel. Such is presently immune to interpretation. Okay I checked: no response)

      Walser's novel exudes a refined decadence. There are echoes of uproar and decay along the margins of Jakob's observations. Jakob Von Gunten has arrived at a vocational institute to be trained as a domestic. Immediately, the protagonist notices that there isn't much instruction, not much activity at all. He details his classmates and accomplishes a self-portrait in the process. This is a petulant being, yet one who aches for earnestness. He aspires and ascribes himself to different forms of historical glory. All the while the owners of the institute confide in him as their own grasp on life loosens and slips. I hated the first half of this novel. It was the gradual inclusion of the adults in the panorama which saved the work for me.
    • 5/5
      Jakob runs away from his alderman father’s house to enroll in a school for servants, and indeed, the author had enrolled in a school for servants at the Castle Dambrau, Silesia, Poland. Walser then moved to Berlin where he wrote this and two other novels. Walser’s brother was a theater scene-painter in Berlin, and Jakob’s brother is an artist who circulates in higher society. The author grew up bilingual because his Biel, Switzerland, bordered both French and German cantons.Walser’s percipience mixes playfulness with pain. “Anyone who chatters is a deceiver…this talking about everything that enters his head makes him a common fellow and a bad one”(83). ( Trumpster off-script, especially his hug-the-flag one at CPAC, 2iii19.) Or again, apply “A person who sets a high value on himself is never safe from discouragements and humiliations”(98)—explains the Prez’s always feeling humiliated, as do MBS and Erdogan and Putin?Walser-Jacob describes success, "Rings glittered on [my] fingers…and I had a belly with flabby… fleshy dignity hanging down it. I felt so completely that I could give commands and let fly with moods…an insatiable appetite…Oh, oh how I reveled in having pulled the ground from under the feet of fellow-men”(92). This brings to mind Our Fatboy Prez.One of Jakob’s fellow students is Beanpole Peter, tall like a stick of wood, which contrasts with laughter. “Laughter is the opposite, it’s something that strikes matches inside you. Matches giggle, exactly like repressed laughter”(110). Here’s the best writing on laughter since Bergson, who emphasized social resonance as opposed to solo, individualist laughter. Repressing increases pleasure, “When inside me I’m bursting with laughter, …all this hissing gunpowder”(111). “Rules do gild existence, they silver it…make it delectable” like the “forbidden delectable laugh.”Kraus, fellow student, is physically hampered, but always working, doorman at the Institute named for Herr Benjamenta; Kraus also does tasks for Herr and his sister the Fraulein who does most of the instruction though there are specialty teachers usually sleeping. Two of several other students are Schilinsky from Poland and Fuchs, who “is crosswise, Fuchs is askew”(43). So Jakob relaxes when Fuchs leaves, he “couldn’t deal with him”(98).Compare this Swiss author to N’Orleans’ JK Toole in "Confederacy of Dunces"; unlike modern poets, neither novelist advertises his madness—Walser in fact spent twenty-seven years in an Asylum, the Herisau Sanatarium. He was well known for his long walks, sometimes in a three-piece suit, attested by the photos we have. Toole famously committed suicide when unable to publish his masterwork, as indeed Walser entered the sanatarium suicidal from inability to support himself despite three admired novels and dozens of short stories, as well as poems. Some recent modern poets boast about their suicidal insanity—Plath, Sexton, Hart Crane, maybe Berryman, Esenin.Caught between “Victorian” Swiss mores and modernity with sexuality (like Joyce’s Dubliners about the same date, though Irish refusal to publish delayed it five years), Walser makes fleeting allusions to sex such as at the bar with sofas (bordello?) where a woman plies the teen Jakob with drink and invites him to “Say Hello,” “And so I did what they call Saying Hello in such places, that is, she explained it to me, laughing and joking, and then I did it. A moment later I found myself on the evening street, cleaned out, down to the last penny” (25-6). And in his all-male school, he describes Tremala, the oldest. “He stood quietly behind me and reached with his disgusting hand…for my intimate member, with the intention of doing me a loathsome favor, almost like tickling an animal”(35).Von Gunten ends in a thorough and dramatic manner, though I shall not add a spoiler.
    • 5/5
      If only my German were better! I am sure that reading Jakob von Gunten in the original would only heighten my (already quite high) estimation of Robert Walser. Writing in 1909, Walser seems to be the missing link between the petty nihilism of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Nietzsche’s emphatic “I” (cf. Why I Write Such Good Books), and Kafka’s bewildering bureaucracy. Taken all together, they each serve as a response--specifically an absurdist response--to industrialization and the increasingly impersonalized bureaucratic world. Like the Underground Man, Jakob von Gunten is an unreliable narrator who mischievously delights in self-contradiction. Both are rogues. Knaves. Both take a special pride in their lowliness, and cultivate it as an end in itself. Both aspire to be zeros, and for both, that aspiration itself paradoxically makes them a Someone rather than No One. Both are fetishists with strong masochistic streaks. Both are bored. Both share a dark, cynical humor.Jakob von Gunten is not a man who has humbly and virtuously given up his life of privilege for a life of service; he is an insouciant playboy who enrolls himself at the Benjamenta Institute on a whim, making a game of being trained to serve. For Jakob, the goal is not to become a butler, but to go on being disciplined indefinitely by the brother-sister duo who run the institute. Indefinite disciplining requires that Jakob succeed just enough to interest the siblings, but not enough for him to graduate. Jakob von Gunten is always himself and never himself. The more he tries to shrug off his semi-aristocratic past, the more he embodies it. Cleverness runs in the von Gunten family. I mean the way genteel hyper-self-consciousness results in the subtle flaunting of privilege via tact. Jakob’s semi-mad journal reveals that he is at the center of a paradox: to be a good servant entails taking pride in one’s work, which undermines the very concept of servility. Humility and pride rub up against one another: von Gunten is titillated by this friction. He fetishizes it. Although Coetzee called Jakob an “almost forgotten classic,” once one reads Walser, one feels his descendents are legion. Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline is a brilliant homage to Walser the man, and Jakob the character. It would not surprise me if Dennis Cooper’s Marbled Swarm was modeled after Jakob’s speeches, or if Chuck Palaniuk’s entire comic-neurotic oeuvre is inspired by Walser. Bulgakov too has a Walserian flavor. Kafka loved him, as did Walter Benjamin. I’m a bit miffed I didn’t read this book earlier in life!
    • 5/5
      A strange book with a great tone. A disturbing, playful, and profound book. There is very little story but rather a disquieting series of vignettes about a school for servants narrated by one of the students.
    • 4/5
      A bit more amusing than I expected: Walser belongs to the rather over-populated group of middle-class intellectuals who write about their experience of living with the lower classes, but he is one of the few to do so not out of mere necessity or political conviction, but from a sheer bloody-minded refusal to fit into the groove that life had set out for him. With its combination of arrogance, self-disgust, and clumsy affection for the people he encounters, Walser's fictionalised account of his time as a student at a run-down training school for domestic servants reminded me rather of Thomas Bernhard's memoir of working in a grocery store in Der Keller (of course, Walser's experience was 40 years earlier than Bernhard's). Walser goes off into allegorical dream-sequences where Bernhard indulges his taste for linguistic exuberance, but the principle is much the same: the main difference is that Walser is a rather milder soul, and lacks Bernhard's sustained anger with the world.
    • 5/5
      I hope to take the time to writer a longer review, but I thought this novel was just amazing. I've yet to read the introduction, but I hope it gives some insight into the translation process, because the langauge was just beautiful. It's a book that I was yearning to reread before I was finished.

      The style and feeling of Walser's von Gunten brings to mind Knut Hamson, and particularly his novels Pand and Hunger. The novel Jakob von Gunten lived up to my expectations and then some.
    • 3/5
      Imagine the school scenes from Gormenghast rewritten by Kafka and you'll have a good idea of the atmosphere of Jakob von Gunten, a short and stodgy philosophical fable of a very Germanic kind. It's easy to see why Kafka and Hesse were such fans; I wasn't quite so convinced, although I can understand why so many people love it.The novel consists of a journal written by the title character, who has enrolled in a school for servants (based on Walser's own experience at a valet school in Berlin). The Benjamenta Institute is a closed world, with its own bizarre rules, a remote Principal, a mysterious Instructress – it's all dusty classrooms and intimations of impending disaster. In this constrained setting, Jakob conducts his own explorations of the interior world – probing his mind, examining his relationships with other people, and recording everything in a breathless, childlike narrative.The microcosmic environment and the introspective narrator combine to produce a sort of parable about the importance of fully immersing yourself in everyday existence.I pay attention, and that makes life more beautiful, for if we don't have to pay attention there really is no life.However, this theme doesn't come without a certain ‘nativist’, anti-intellectual strain that I found a little disingenuous, however appealing. Jakob hates ‘the kind of person who pretends he understands everything and beamingly parades knowledge and wit’; what he likes is simplicity, people who simply do, without analysing. This is an awkward message for a writer to pull off, because a writer is precisely someone who reflects on and analyses their experiences. (And indeed for Jakob, 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.’)Of course, Jakob himself has to embody exactly what he says he hates, otherwise he wouldn't be able to narrate a book. So he's intelligent and thoughtful, but he's not happy about it.I despise my capacity for thinking. I value only experiences, and these, as a rule, are quite independent of all thinking and comparing. Thus I value the way in which I open a door. There is more hidden life in opening a door than in asking a question.A really beautiful phrase – but the idea behind it, though attractive, with a little reflection seems obviously wrong. I say ‘obviously’ because if it were true, there would be no need to write books like this in the first place. If this book has any value at all, then that value can only be conveyed through means that the book itself disparages.It has to be said as well that Christopher Middleton's translation (in the NYRB edition) seems rather heavy-handed and, well, infelicitous at times. We have sentences such as, ‘Schacht likes to offend against the rules and I, to be candid, unfortunately no less,’ which can only go through your head in a thick German accent. (Oops, I mean Swiss.) On the other hand, Middleton's introduction reads a bit awkwardly too, so maybe that's just the way he speaks.Walser once said, ‘God is the opposite of Rodin.’ I don't know what he meant but I like it, and I didn't want to end this review without mentioning it somewhere. This book is similarly cryptic, provocative and anti-artistic. I wouldn't recommend it exactly, but if I saw you reading it in Starbucks I'd nod sagely and offer to buy you another pumpkin latte.
    • 5/5
      An imaginative, deceptively simple book. One becomes almost suspicious of the narrator half-way. It's nice that there is no plot (just beautiful prose-poem-like passages) until close to the end. But the last 20 pages is where the actual plot lies (by that time you're lulled into the strangely lit mood-world so convincingly that it really affects you). I loved the quiet humor of this book, and the slightly uncomfortable feeling I get from it.
    • 3/5
      I read this 100 years after it was written, at first inkling (or at least: promise) of a new cultural era. I sense that Walser addressed modernity and reason, perhaps in a way reminiscent (preminiscent) of Walter Benjamin. It reads so solidly "modern" that it's easy to overlook the fact it was written so long before its overall feel, outlook, sensibility became the norm.
    • 4/5
      Jacob Von Gruten by Robert Walser is a look into the life of a young man from the lower middle classes of the AustrianEmpire before WWI.Enrolled in a school for servants he quickly seperates himself as both an observor and outstanding pupil. The hardest part is giving into the discipline and subservient position but, once accomplished, he stands out as a student with special talents. The principal of the Benjamenta Institue and his sister, the head instructress, both are attracted to him and reach out to him in intimate fashion further distingusihnig him in relation to the other students.The Institute has trouble attracting new students and the book ends tragically for the sister who dies and the Institute closes but Jacob, still not employed as a servant, throws his lot in with the Principal who seeks companionship from Jacob. The 2 go off to tour the world together.A curious tale, it certainly decpicts the inner life of this young man as he sets out to find a meager place in the world he lives in. Brief yet dense and engrossing.
    • 4/5
      the second half of this is when it really picks up, and the climax at the very end has many that's-a-helluva-sentence sentences. mm.
    • 4/5
      Quick and light and airy. It seems to float around up in the aether. It's hard to get a clear handle on what it's about. It's surrealistic or allegorical at times and realistic at others.It's told in the form of a journal and the eponymous narrator contradicts himself almost every time he says something that seems definite.In the end the point seems to be, as related in a dream, to leave behind European culture to wander in some kind of wilderness.
    • 4/5
      This quirky book is a fictional journal of a student in a school for butlers. Quite enchanting at times, almost always warmhearted and naive and sometimes a bit petulant too. Wisdom in naivety.