Robert Walser

The Assistant

«One moning art eight o'clock a young man stood at the door of a solitary and, it appeared, attractive house. I was raining.»

These are the initial words of Robert Walser’s second novel The Assistant. It was published in 1908 by Bruno Cassirer in Berlin. The beginning is characteristic because it announces a promising opening while at the same time notes en passant that appearances are deceiving. Walser himself observed later in a remarkably ambiguous phrase that The Assistant was actually no novel but rather an excerpt of everyday life in Switzerland.
The young man’s name is Joseph Marti and he is interviewing for a job with the Engineer Carl Tobler that morning. His latest inventions, however – an advertisement watch, a shooting automaton as well as an innovative chair for the ill –, all prove to be failures. These events offer the assistant insights into the economic relations of the 20th century, and he closely experiences the gradual downfall of a bourgeois family.
Compared to his two other novels Geschwister Tanner and Jakob von Gunten, this novel appears to be more conventional, leaning more strongly on realistic narrative traditions; the Swiss Bärenswil reminds us of Keller’s Seldwyla. Just as the façade of the bourgeois house is crumbling, the ‹seemingly› realistic narration is subtly undermined. The action moves into the background while the economic crisis effects the narrative. It is not least for its complex and refined narration that this novel counts as one of the more trenchant threshold texts of modernity.

(Marc Caduff, transl. by Anja Hälg)

Translation of title: Der Gehülfe

Penguin, London 2008

ISBN: 978-0-14-118928-4