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, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely
recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and
irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of
schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of
uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful
sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri
Rousseau.