Jakob Von Gunten
Author(s): Robert Walser
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.
General Information
- :
- : New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
- : The New York Review of Books, Inc
- : 0.216
- : 30 June 1999
- : United States
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Robert Walser
- : Paperback
- : 9909
- : 833.912
- : 176
More About The Product
Robert Walser (1878 1956) was born into a German speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while writing his poems, novels, and vast numbers of the prose pieces that became his hallmark. In 1933 he was confined to a sanatorium, which marked the end of his writing career. Among Walser s works available in English are "Berlin Stories" and "Jakob von Gunten" (both available as NYRB classics), "Thirty Poems," "The Walk," "The Tanners," "Microscripts," "The Assistant," "The Robber," "Masquerade and Other Stories," and "Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912 1932." Christopher Middleton (b. 1926) is a poet, essayist, and translator. He teaches Germanic languages and literature at the University of Texas at Austin and has translated numerous works, including"Jakob von Gunten"by Robert Walser."
