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 and four novels of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. It tells the story of a seventeen-year-old runaway from an old family who enrolls in a school for servants. The Institute run by the domineering Herr Benjamenta and his beautiful but ailing sister is a deeply mysterious place: the faculty lies asleep in a single room. The students though subject to fierce discipline come and go at will. Jakob an irrepressibly subversive presence keeps a journal in which he records his quirky impressions of the school as well as his own quickly changing enthusiasms and uncertainties deliberations and dreams. And in the end as the Institute itself dissolves around him like a dream he steps out boldly to explore still-unimagined worlds.
