Wandering with Robert Walser

Waggish on The Assistant:

What’s strange about The Assistant is that it is much more easily connected to those German antecedents and successors. This short novel about Joseph Marti’s life as a live-in assistant to the hapless inventor Carl Tobler and his family has clear affinities with the more pedestrian neuroses portrayed in the stories of Hofmannsthal, and the outsized characters (not just Tobler, but Joseph’s alcoholic predecessor Wirsich, and the two Manicheistic Tobler daughters) are a more subdued version of the histrionics of Schnitzler and Wedekind. But what’s most striking is how the tone and scenario anticipate that of early Kafka, particularly that of “The Stoker” and the novel it became part of, The Man Who Disappeared (aka Amerika). Walser is often compared spuriously to Kafka, but in The Assistant, and not in any of his other work that I’ve read, I think there’s some merit to the comparison.

Another thought I had last week, when I happened to flip through my copy of The Possessed: there’s some Dostoevsky in there too.

Sam :: Sep.29.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

Rob Tocalino. Boldtype #48. Theme: Jobs. Read it.

The scene alternates between the claustrophobic comforts of the Tobler house and the enchanting Swiss lake country. With the cramped basement workshop cluttered with dead-end projects and creditors circling the house like wolves, Marti escapes from the numbing futility of his labor into the dream-like alpine landscape and scattered memories of his past. Walser passes through one enlightening digression after another, and plot points often emerge with little foreshadowing only to be obscured just as quickly by Marti’s reveries.

Check out especially the embedded links.

Sam :: Sep.26.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

A tip of the Berghut to Smyth, who alerts me to Christopher Byrd’s excellent review of The Assistant in the September 2007 issue of The Believer. Only the opening paragraphs are online, and so here, for your delectation, is the final one:

There is nothing in the story’s plot that will catch readers unaware. The same is not the case for this novel’s sentences. In addition to [Walter] Benjamin, Kafka was also impressed by Walser. In a passage which comes when a potential investor makes his way to the Toblers’ villa, it’s possible to see why: “What a delicate, almost feminine handwriting the man had. Nearly all capitalists wrote just like this man: with precision and at the same time somewhat offhandedly.” Along with Kafka, Walser is a great chronicler of that imbalances between worker and employer, and the spillover from such an arrangement into family life. Yet, The Assistant is more of a palliative work than a diagnostic one; it might not deepen your understanding of life under capitalism, but it might cushion it.

The ending makes me think of Beckett. (“Life is an illness, for which sleep is a palliative and death is the cure.”)

Sam :: Sep.19.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »

Apologies to all those who have written in recent weeks and not received a response. I am slowly getting to all my emails as my workaday obligations permit. Swift, as always, said it better than I can: my literary efforts “are the fruits of a very few leisure hours, stolen from the short intervals of a world of business, and of an employment quite alien from such amusements as this.”

My short intervals lately have been devoted to restarting our little translation project. You’ll note a new chapter has appeared, and the next one is materializing day by day, a sentence or paragraph at a time. Today, Robert tries to buy a suit.

Sam :: Sep.19.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »