In the Library
Jakob Von Gunten
Robert Walser, 1909
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 3 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 42k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
Jakob von Gunten walks out of a distinguished family to enroll himself in a shabby little school that trains boys to vanish gracefully into other people's houses as servants, and in his diary he keeps announcing, half proud and half amused, that his only real ambition is to become a zero. The entries that follow are gleeful, contradictory, and a little unhinged, the record of a mind so happy to shrink that shrinking starts to look like the only freedom worth having. Franz Kafka read pages of this book aloud to friends and laughed until he had to stop. Almost nothing resembling a real lesson happens behind the institute's locked inner door, and when Fräulein Benjamenta, the school's one true teacher, sickens and dies, the whole enterprise starts coming apart like a rumor losing its source. What is left is her brother's grief and an offer nobody expected: leave everything, come away with me. Jakob says yes, walking out of the one place that had ever agreed, however briefly, to make him small enough to feel safe.