Wandering with Robert Walser

Wow, this article from 2004 is really something. I didn’t know that Walser scholar Bernhard Echte has restored the house in Wadenswil that was the real-life setting for The Assistant. He lives there today with his wife. Accompanying the article are a few nice photos.

Walser fans apparently visit the place now and then:

Actually we do not feel like the owners, but rather as trustees of a history. Many visitors come, and I believe also that one reads the novel differently if one has been in this house. Last summer … we showed the house to over 500 visitors. Fortunately, Walser lovers are kind people inclined to self irony. I believe that the nature of an author also rubs off a little on his admirers. I can imagine that Thomas Mann fans are somewhat different.

Echte also shares the unlikely story of how he discovered the writer who would become his life’s work:

My coming to Robert Walser began with a mistake. An aunt wanted to buy a book by Martin Walser and got one by Robert: Geschwister Tanner, which she then passed on to me; I was at that time seventeen. I knew after five minutes: this is my author, I want to read everything of his.

He also provides the real-life denouement missing from the novel:

Four weeks after Walser left, Dubler went broke, the house was sold off, the couple divorced, and the children were taken in by an orphanage. It was a terrible story.

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Sam :: Aug.25.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

Ok, yes, I admit it: I’ve been holding out on you. Three more reviews of The Assistant have appeared in recent days:

From the Los Angeles Times last Sunday, Benjamin Weissman say Walser “might be the single most underrated writer of the 20th century.”

Walser pauses to reflect on pet words, thought patterns, handwriting, facial expressions, job guilt, food, sounds, nature in all its subtle spectacularity and, above all, the self-mockery that seems, by turns, to anchor him and set his sail. Each moment is ornamented, endowed with life and vibrancy, both from the flickering outside world and the inner firings of Walser’s imagination. Whether he’s writing about an inventor’s assistant here or a young man studying to be a butler in “Jakob Von Gunten” (his finest novel and among the few translated into English), Walser’s aesthetic stance becomes quite radical as he renounces traditional subject matter in order to float, drift and play.

Same Sunday, different paper: in the New York Times Book Review last week, Alison McCulloch included a capsule review of “Walser’s remarkable 1908 novel” in the NYTBR’s “Fiction Chronicle” column:

Tobler’s wife feels trapped as bankruptcy approaches and at times is even jealous of her husband’s lowly clerk (You are bound to nothing permanent, trapped by nothing that might hinder you). He, in turn, covets what she already has — a home, a family, a better place in the world. Joseph knows his position, and both resents and embraces it. Why, he asks himself after one of his employer’s cruel outbursts, do I stay? His heartbreakingly human answer: “How beautiful it was to belong to someone, whether in hatred or impatience, displeasure or devotion, melancholy or love.”

Finally, a review by Christine Smallwood will appear in the September 10 print edition of The Nation. It was posted on thenation.com (subs only) today:

The Assistant is a funny, charming novel about the fall of a bourgeois family, the Toblers, and the life of Herr Tobler’s assistant, Joseph. Fired for flubbing a calculation at his old job–”just another instance of mental indolence”–and dressed down as an “imposter,” Joseph arrives at the Tobler home, which is called the Evening Star, for a fresh start. But it quickly becomes clear that his old friend indolence is still very much with him.

I’ll have to track down the full-text version of this article over the weekend.

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Sam :: Aug.24.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »

Another Walser sighting, this one in the August 10, 2007, issue of the TLS (not online). In the paper’s Freelance column, Michael Greenberg writes about artists’ assistants:

A young acquaintance of mine, Dimitri, landed his first job with an artist who constructs fanciful interiors and then photographs them so that they look life-size and real. Dimitri was his sole assistant. Eager to please and quick to feel ridiculed, he described his ambivalent feelings for his boss. “I’m paid to believe in what he’s doing, and I want to care about it. But what if it’s crap?” In the hope that he might find solace in a story of a kindred spirit, I gave him Robert Walser’s novel The Assistant. The protagonist, Joseph, works for an inventor, and fears that his “existence was nothing more than a hand-me-down-jacket, a suit that didn’t quite fit.” Joseph’s working life revolves around his employer’s only invention, an “Advertising Clock,” designed for railway stations, restaurants and hotels. It resembles “a headstrong child, this clock, that requires constant self-sacrificing care and doesn’t even thank one for watching over it … Is the child growing?”

Wrong about the “only invention” of course — what about the Marksman’s Vending Machine, the Invalid Chair, or the Deep-Hole Drilling Machine? But fun to see nonethless.

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Sam :: Aug.15.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »