The Assistant
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- € 8,99
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Dressed in his cheap, battered suit, Joseph Marti arrives at the impressive villa of Karl Tobler, an enthusiastic but ill-starred inventor, to begin employment as his clerk. Tobler is determined to finance his family’s lavish lifestyle with the proceeds from his latest idea – a clock adorned with advertisements. But Tobler’s grand plans are destined for failure and the household, including Marti, refuse to acknowledge their approaching ruin.
Robert Walser claimed to have written The Assistant, a semi-autobiographical work, in just six weeks as an entry for a literary competition. The second of his few surviving novels, it is now regarded as major work of modernist literature.
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Swiss writer Walser (1878-1956) wrote this Kafka-esque novel in 1908. Joseph Marti, a 24-year-old clerk, comes to work and live in the home-office of inventor-entrepreneur Karl Tobler, a boor and practical incompetent. As business prospects dry up and investors lose interest, Joseph's job becomes a surreal parody of itself, his only function to send away creditors, smoke cigars and drink coffee with Tobler's wife. Yet as he awaits the inevitable financial collapse of the family, Joseph remains in thrall of Tobler, subject to nightmares about being berated while he works on, unpaid, in a thankless job that only gets more demeaning. Joseph continually writes letters, "memoirs" and journal entries, but always tears up his writing and throws it in the trash. He remains a willing prisoner of Tobler's rages and declining fortunes, for perverse love of the household in spite of his unhappiness-the archetype of a colorless, characterless, purely functional assistant. As intended, this sly, modern-seeming novel is almost unbearable to read.
