A lovely psychological portrait, partly ruined by a stock plot line

books:


	• The Assistant (New Directions Paperbook) Robert Walser New Directions, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

A lovely psychological portrait, partly ruined by a stock plot line

This is a stupendous and unusual character portrait, marred by a cliché plot of financial downfall.

I agree with Brian Verigan's review, especially the idea that "Walser's hero is... a nobody with drastically limited prospects. He not only knows that and has accepted it, he embraces it." But it bears saying that the reason the apprentice's prospects are limited is that he is a little simple-minded, and he realizes that, partially and intermittently, throughout the novel. It's a difficult trick for a novelist: a slightly limited, partly unintelligent narrator can often result in a schematic novel, in which we are more amused and detached than immersed and engaged. That happens, for examples, in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," which at times becomes a literary trick or puzzle. But in this book, the narrator also has an enormous capacity to understand people, an inherent kindness, and a joy in his natural surroundings. It's true that each of those capacities is limited: he loves his employer somewhat helplessly, even though he sees some of his employer's flaws; he is kind, but his kindnesses are often ineffectual; and he loves nature, but in a completely unreflective way. And he is aware, sometimes, of each of these traits in himself. He loves to eat and sleep, and take walks in the countryside: those are his certainties. He is also deeply concerned with injustices and social infelicities: those are his ongoing interests. The rest is all a cloud: he knows he has no ambition, but he never succeeds in thinking very much about that; and he knows that he probably has very little cleverness, but he doesn't have the energy to keep his mind on that problem long enough to do anything about it. It's a lovely psychological portrait of a partly simple person who is also deeply reflective.

However, I think this book is also flawed. The tremendous psychological portrait of a person who has some kinds of intelligence, and not others -- a portrait that puts so many other such attempts to shame -- is partly ruined by an entirely dstracting plot about the plunging finances of the apprentice's boss. We are compelled to worry about the household finances, and the increasingly angry creditors. The plot resembles an old Hollywood movie or fin-de-siecle pulp fiction, with its stock figures of drunkards, bank managers, and suspicious townspeople. Through all of that, Walser continues to develop the remarkable character of the assistant, as if the machinery of financial ruin were somehow necessary to bring out the assistant's character. But it isn't. The entire novel would have been purer, more convincing, more a masterpiece, if Walser had the confidence to concentrate just on the nature of the assistant. After all, he has a quiet, unchanging nature, so why have an off-the-shelf narrative of ruination blaring away in the background?

for more information click here

An Antidote for Notes from Underground

Hermann Hesse famously remarked "If (Walser) had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place." The Assistant does more to explain that opinion than any of Walser's other books. He was always trying to give a voice to the humble, the self-effacing, the marginalized. But as he aged he came to focus more and more on vignettes, and these seem to have gotten odder and odder. In this early work, he gives a full-length portrait of people on the edge, of society and of financial ruin.

I approached the novel with some uneasiness, wondering whether the delicate, fragile magic his briefer pieces demonstrate could sustain such a long (for him) work (295 pages). I'm happy to report that it does, and beautifully. There are short sections, like the hero's recollection of a childhood outing, that could very well have stood alone but are woven into the texture of the narrative flawlessly.

The outing he recalls was a perfectly beautiful and happy experience, and some fleeting references make it clear that this was far from normal for his home life. It's a delicate moment that brings the hero's life into sharp, individual relief, but also makes clear that his life is part of the same heartbreaking continuum as that of the doomed family he's temporarily become a part of.

I recently tried to re-read Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (Notes from a Hole in the Floor, really; excuse the picked nit) and found I no longer have a taste for it. Dostoyevsky's satire is fiercely focused on the vile and pathological. Walser's hero is a far sadder figure, a nobody with drastically limited prospects. He not only knows that and has accepted it, he embraces it. He has his occasional bursts of meanness or ill-temper, but so do we all.

Jakob von Gunten is a shorter book, and perhaps more representative of Walser's irreduceable and irreplaceable oddness. But The Assistant is the book I'd recommend someone new to Walser to start with.

for more information click here

"Curse those bacon-and-sausage eaters!"

Joseph Marti, a young man between jobs, gains the position of Assistant at the villa and workplace of Carl Tobler, a struggling and possibly-cockamamie inventor. Despite Tobler's unpromising professional struggle and his lack of investors, he puts no brakes on his expensive joie de vivre. Joseph ends up smoking cheroots, sending away creditors, taking hilarious dictations, alternately entertaining and vexing Tobler's wife, and enjoying the Tobler's bountiful lunches and dinners:

"Sit down. Wherever you like, it doesn't matter. And eat until you've had your fill. Here's the bread. Cut yourself as much as you'd like. There's no need to hold back. Go ahead and pour yourself several cups--there's plenty of coffee. And here is butter. The butter, as you see, is here to be eaten. And here's some jam, should you happen to be a jam-lover. Would you like some fried potatoes as well?"

Hospitality is practically stuffed in Joseph's face, though he refuses to believe that he ever earns it. A good stuffing of hospitality at the dinner table is a recurring theme in Walser's work.

The Tobler family slides into dispossession. Walser captures the impendingness of the situation by describing the characters and their interactions over the course of about a year. A letter from Tobler's mother coldly punctuates the end of the story with a vicious moral, though that isn't the end of the book.

What shines to me isn't the plot (does anyone read for plot?) but the details of Joseph's inner turmoil, its occasional outlets, plus the THEATRICAL MOOD SWINGS OF TOBLER, and Walser's unbelievably fresh and insightful descriptions of simple events like going for a swim in a lake or waking up in bed on a Sunday morning. His pre-kafkaesque description of a credit auditor's lurking around the villa is a classic passage here, too. (It rivals or surpasses the supernatural domestic fantasy of Marquez's Solitude and the bureacratic goons of Kafka, and pre-dates both of them).

The sudden appearance of a military prison episode forms one of Walser's best and only ensemble scenes. ("Slap the Ham")

Joseph is the usual Walserian hero: he's timid, he's doubtful of his own importance and abilities, he privately rags on himself out loud in high-style, yet he will burst out with an impudent speech to his masters. I still don't fully understand whether these impassioned officially-worded outbursts are a piece of comedy, a projection of Walser's mental state, or have some basis in the reality of actual conversations in Switzerland/Germany in the 1900's.

If you're new to Walser I recommend Jakob Von Gunten, his most accessible and probably famous work, which is made so breezy by its young schoolboy narrator. Everyone should start there. If you're not new to Walser then you'll obviously want this book, there's nothing to say so I've done you no favors, unless you are a stick in the mud.

Did I forget to say this is an extremely enjoyable book?

for more information click here

This classic by Robert Walser?who was admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, Walter Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald?is now presented in English for the very first time.

Robert Walser is an overwhelmingly original author with many ardent fans: J. M. Coetzee ("dazzling"), Guy Davenport ("a very special kind of whimsical-serious-deep writer"), and Hermann Hesse ("If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place"). Charged with compassion, and an utterly unique radiance of vision, Walser is as Susan Sontag exclaimed "a truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer."

The Assistant is his breathtaking 1908 novel, translated by award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Joseph, hired to become an inventor's new assistant, arrives one rainy Monday morning at Technical Engineer Karl Tobler's splendid hilltop villa: he is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures? The Assistant chronicles Joseph's inner life of cascading emotions as he attempts, both frantically and light-heartedly, to help the Tobler household, even as it slides toward financial ruin. Tobler demands of Joseph, "Do you have your wits about you?!" And Joseph's wits are in fact all around him, trembling like leaves in the breeze?he is full of exuberance and despair, all the raptures and panics of a person "drowning in obedience."

for more information click here