Also published as: Institute Benjamenta

Author: Robert Walser Year: 1909 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Fiction, Classic, Short Stories Culture: Germany Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Barns&Noble Amazon Google Books LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780940322219 0940322218

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. Similar books: The Holy Sinner by Thomas Mann Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch Amerika by Franz Kafka The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch Local Anaesthetic by Gunter Grass The Tanners by Robert Walser The Assistant by Robert Walser An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke The Flounder by Gunter Grass Gantenbein by Max Frisch Peter Camenzind by Hermann Hesse Chess Story by Stefan Zweig Death in Venice by Thomas Mann Amok and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield