March Reading Group Selection: The Assistant by Robert Walser

The Book Beat reading group selection for March is The Assistant by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. This will be a virtual Zoom meeting scheduled for Wednesday, March 30 at 7 PM. Books are now available at Book Beat and are discounted 15%. Books can also be purchased on our affliate page, online at Bookshop.org.

If you would like to attend, and are not on our reading group list, please RSVP to us with your name, phone number and email and we will send you notices and updates. Reminders and login links are sent to your inbox on the morning or day of the meeting. Please check your email and try to login 5-10 minutes before the meeting so we can begin on time. The Book Beat reading group is specialized in literary fiction and World Lit in translation. The group is free, open to the public. We have been meeting in person since the 1990s, and online since 2020.

The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself. –Robert Walser

“Joseph, hired as an inventor’s new assistant, arrives one rainy Monday morning at Technical Engineer Carl Tobler’s splendid hilltop villa: he is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities… As he attempts to help the Tobler household (sliding toward financial ruin), The Assistant pours Joseph’s inner life of cascading emotions—of exuberance, of despair, of all the raptures and panics of someone ‘drowning in obediance'” –Publisher’s blurb

“For my money, Walser’s best book.” – Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

“Walser’s most ambitious novel, and his bravest. Its ambition lies not in the scale of its action, which is as modest as ever, but in its effort to reach beyond the diminshed, the minor, toward a fuller human life. An unforgettable, heart-rending book.” – J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate

“A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sad, as haunted.” – Susan Sontag

“Essential, exquisitely poised absurdity.” – Christian Caryl, The New York Review of Books

“His ideal was to overcome the force of gravity… He is no Expressionist visionary prophesying the end of the world, but rather a clairvoyant of the small. From his earliest attempts on, his natural inclination is for the most radical minimization and brevity, in other words the possibility of setting down a story in one fell swoop, without any deviation or hesitation.” – W.G. Sebald, The New Yorker



Robert Walser (1878-1956) was born into a German-speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence, working as a copyist, an inventor’s assistant, a butler, and various other low-paying trades while he wrote the poems, novels, and innumerable prose pieces that became his legacy. His work was admired by Kafka, Herman Hesse, Stephan Zweig, and Walter Benjamin. Despite marginal early success in his literary career, his popularity gradually diminished over the second and third decades of the 20th century, making it increasingly difficult for him to support himself through writing. He eventually suffered a nervous breakdow and in 1933 abandoned writing and entered Waldau sanatorium, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

On Christmas, 1956, he was found dead of a heart attack in a field of snow near the asylum. The photographs of his corpse in the snow are reminiscent of a similar image of a dead man in the snow from his first novel, The Tanners. A revival of interest in Walser arose when, in the late 20th century and early 2000s, a vast collection of his work, written while in Waldau, was finally deciphered, translated, and published. These were scraps of paper—postcards, telegrams, receipts, calendars, envelopes, torn-off covers of potboilers—covered in almost microscopic writing, with letters one or two millimeters tall. The shrunken text allowed him to fit an entire short story on a business card. Often he cut these scraps themselves down into narrower strips, on which he then wrote.

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