Jakob Von Gunten

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.