In the case of robert walser, the writer sheltered the madman eager to take control. In adequate doses of madness, great books emerged among the other poetic vocation that also occupied the first Walser. But every mind immersed in the inner labyrinths of sorrow, pain, fear or oblivion ends up giving up on reason and, therefore, on literature in the case of Walser.
False pseudo-romantic idealizations aside about any type of dementia or madness, the prolific bibliography of this Swiss writer stands out to a greater extent in his first confirmations as a young novelist and is diluted in later stages. Walser always turned to literature as a refuge from his traumas and disabilities. But only at certain moments did he find in literature that strange lucidity on the edge of the abyss. A lucidity that, yes, gave him the opportunity to compose great stories.
With the matter of Walser and mental illness an interesting space opens where many other writers of all times would have a place, from Edgar Allan Poe but also Foster Wallace. But that would be another matter to address. For now we are left with the best of Robert Walser.
Top 3 recommended novels by Robert Walser
The Tanner brothers
The frankness with which the author approached this work immediately reveals an undisguised transmutation of his personality. Everything has its justification or excuse, from the most obvious eccentricity to the most intimate obsession. Making literature about what moves us as a dictate that does not lead us to be like others is a creative heroism.
The point is that, beyond the fact that Simón, its protagonist, may or may not be Robert Walser, that frankness extends like a distressing blanket of certainties, evidence, uncomfortable truths and sensations of the imperative of life, of that present as a fact. unique undoubted. Our determination not to live or occupy that space that determines every second that passes in the very moment in which we breathe is the most uncomfortable of contradictions. Discovering it can be as true as it is crazy. Robert Walser knew it immediately and expressed it in this first brilliant novel of his life.
The Tanners are a bunch of losers, perhaps marked by their last name (genetics) or perhaps misdirected by circumstances. The point is to discover in them that condemnation of destiny. Thus there is no other choice but to walk savoring that present along the way, where there are no defeats or hardships, only path and cadences of seconds and breathing.
Jakob von gunten
From a very young age, Walser already seemed to guess in the annulment of all will and ambition, a great achievement to live away from insubstantial existences that end in empty lives and guilt. Perhaps it was also a way to channel his most marked social phobias. The point is that the idea strangely caught on, like the young man in The Catcher in the Rye salinger, but in a more nihilistic context if possible.
«You learn very little here, there is a lack of teaching staff and we, the boys of the Benjamenta Institute, will never amount to anything, that is, tomorrow we will all be very modest and subordinate people. The teaching they give us basically consists of instilling in us patience and obedience, two qualities that promise little or no success. Internal successes, yes. But what advantage do you get from them? Who do inner conquests feed?
Thus begins Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser's third novel, the author's most loved, but also the most controversial and innovative, written in 1909 in Berlin, three years after leaving the Institute where he had been educated. And the great protagonist of this "singularly delicate story", according to a judgment by Walter Benjamin, is the Benjamenta Institute itself: the student Jakob, through his diary, introduces us to all its secrets, its dramas and small tragedies and its all its mysteries, making it one of the most memorable settings in XNUMXth century literature.
Assistant
At the time, this novel had a more morbid point because it closely approximated certain events around a time in which Walser was in the service of a relevant character of his time. Nowadays, it is about something else. Because the vision of Walser, transmuted into the helpful Joseph, transports us to those interiorities of couples that break up, of coexistences that explode, of wounds that open never to close again.
Assistant tells, with extraordinary irony, the story of the engineer Tobler, who separated from his wife and four children after going bankrupt, a process that will be attended step by step, and in the most submissive way, his faithful employee Joseph. Walser recounts an autobiographical experience, slightly altered, after working six months in the house of the engineer Dubler. The novel was published in 1908, and was received by critics with the greatest of enthusiasm.
