The New York Review of Books, showing a lordly disregard for those rags of time we call months and years, includes in its February 11, 2010, issue a review of Walser’s The Assistant. Written by Christian Caryl, the review is entitled, “The Conjurer.”

The Assistant came out (wait a minute, let me look) on July 27, 2007. I expected reviews to appear in both the NYRB and the TLS right about now, but I thought they would cover both of the recently translated novels, The Assistant and The Tanners, not just the former. Shows what I know.

I guess we can look forward to a review of The Tanners in 2011 and The Microscripts in 2013, the last of which we might enjoy as we dine on our breakfast capsules in our sub-orbital tract homes.

Caryl’s pilgrimage visits the usual stations (the poverty, the illness, the tiny script, the madhouse, the snow), eventually to arrive at one of my favorite themes—crazy boss meets crazy employee:

The farther we read, the less we can avoid asking the question: Why is Marti still sticking around? To be sure, he certainly doesn’t want to end up on the street again. But there’s a better answer, one that comes far into the narrative, almost near the end—at which point Marti is still waiting for a salary that will never be paid:

What was prompting him to continue on as this man’s employee? The salary outstanding? Yes, among other things. But there was something quite different as well, something more important: he loved this man with all his heart…. For it was inevitable that something a person was fond of, something he felt bound and conjoined to, would cause him distress as well: he would have to struggle with it, there would be much about it that displeased him, and at times he would even hate it because he had always felt so powerfully drawn to it.

This “love” is not sexual. Nor is it even a longing for friendship. It is, rather, atavistically hierarchical—a paternal relationship, a low-ranker’s affection for his natural superior. This motive of love—a love that isn’t even really interested in being requited—goes a long way toward framing the novel’s essential, exquisitely poised absurdity: the vexed legal and moral relationship between the assistant and his employer, neither one of whom is in a position to live up to the contract they have entered into. The employer—if Tobler can be dignified by the term—has no money to pay Marti, and the assistant is performing tasks that have been rendered meaningless by the boss’s failure to build a legitimate business. The narrative draws much of its dark comic impetus from the tension between the two men’s roles in this strange embrace—Marti’s fecklessness perfectly complementing Tobler’s aggressive vacuity.

Caryl goes on to note that “some readers—like the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben—have seen in Tobler something like a parody of the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions.”

All in all—good stuff.

(Thanks to Dave Lull for the tip.)

Sam :: Jan.23.2010 :: Review, The Assistant :: 8 Comments »