Christopher Middleton

In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett." The more common comparison is to "a comic Kafka." Both formulations effectively describe the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the presence of a mind-bending genius, but one characterized by a wry, buoyant voice, as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing.

Jakob von Gunten is a seventeen-year-old runaway who enrolls in a school for servants. The Institute 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, a spirited and subversive presence, keeps a journal in which he records his quirky impressions of the school, as well as his own enthusiasms and uncertainties, deliberations and dreams. And in the end,...