The Assistant by Robert Walser -- who was admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald -- is now presented in English for the very first time.

"A major writer.... A Paul Klee in prose -- as delicate, as shy, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett." --Susan Sontag

"Robert Walser is a bewitched genius." --Newsweek

"The Assistant is an absolutely wonderful book.... It occurred to me that if one read one 20th-century novel, there is a case to be made for it being The Assistant." --Michael Hofmann

Robert Walser is an overwhelmingly original author with many ardent fans: J.M. Coetzee ("dazzling"), Guy Davenport ("a very special kind of whimsical-serious-deep writer"), and Hermann Hesse ("If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place"). Charged with compassion, and an utterly unique radiance of vision, Walser is as Susan Sontag exclaimed "a truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer."

The Assistant is his breathtaking 1908 novel, translated by award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Joseph, hired to become an inventor's new assistant, arrives one rainy Monday morning at Technical Engineer Karl Tobler's splendid hilltop villa: he is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures? The Assistant chronicles Joseph's inner life of cascading emotions as he attempts, both frantically and light-heartedly, to help the Tobler household, even as it slides toward financial ruin. Tobler demands of Joseph, "Do you have your wits about you?!" And Joseph's wits are in fact all around him, trembling like leaves in the breeze -- he is full of exuberance and despair, all the raptures and panics of a person "drowning in obedience."

ROBERT WALSER (1878-1956) worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic in 1933 and institutionalized for the rest of his life, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand stories.

Date of publication: July 2007