Tanuj’s review of Jakob von Gunten > Likes and Comments

Please Sir, remove Rilke from the list?

Riku wrote: "Please Sir, remove Rilke from the list?"
Reason to do bhai?

Tanuj wrote: "Riku wrote: "Please Sir, remove Rilke from the list?"
Reason to do bhai?"

Just to avoid the sinking feeling that comes from the thinking of Rilke as outmoded/forgotten. Surely he is not. If he is, can we pretend for a while?

Riku wrote: "Tanuj wrote: "Riku wrote: "Please Sir, remove Rilke from the list?"
Reason to do bhai?"

Just to avoid the sinking feeling that comes from think of Rilke as outmoded/forgotten. Surely he is not. If..."

But if I call Musil forgotten, then how can I favor Rilke. Even Broch is near-forgotten. I accept your point, consider Rilke's name removed in spirit :)

Riku wrote: "Tanuj wrote: "Riku wrote: "Please Sir, remove Rilke from the list?"
Reason to do bhai?"

Just to avoid the sinking feeling that comes from think of Rilke as outmoded/forgotten. Surely he is not. If..."

Btw: get your hands on some Cesare Pavese poems.

Ha great review, I've been eyeing Walser for awhile and now I will proceed with more caution. A lot of post-modernism seems to make reading books like these scream out as slightly out-dated, often I keep thinking 'when is it going to get meta and comment on this?!', but usually I still enjoy them.

s.penkevich wrote: "Ha great review, I've been eyeing Walser for awhile and now I will proceed with more caution. A lot of post-modernism seems to make reading books like these scream out as slightly out-dated, often ..."

Our reasons for eyeing Walser must've been similar. I don't recommend this. It provides no joy in itself. The only fun is in thinking how this or that construct was made much finer by this or that writer in years to come.

Besides, it's written in a very skim-friendly manner - difficult to keep your concentration sentence after sentence. Not so because it is challenging, but the opposite.

Hi Tanuj,

It's a shame you started with Jakob von Gunten when it came time to read Walser; had I done the same I might not have proceeded either, since it's far from my favourite work of his. (I recommend Selected Stories AKA The Walk & Other Stories translated by Christopher Middleton, if you're interested.)

That said, I want to respond to this part of your review:

Should one spend time reading these works, whose major value seems to arise from their being a precursor to some other more important work?

It seems a question too loaded with value judgements for my liking: the idea that Walser's major value is as an influence on Kafka, the idea that his work is not important. For my part, I take great pleasure in hunting down works that have influenced works I admire, and have found many, to me, "important" works that way (sometimes more important than the more famous works they influenced). Besides which, who's to say that Walser isn't hugely important in his own language, or that the reason he is lesser-known in the Anglo world isn't the relative difficulty of translating his work. (One thing about Kafka, he kept it simple, facilitating ease of translation.) To take another example, until the 1990s Fernando Pessoa was barely known to English speakers despite being considered the pre-eminent modern poet in Portugal. Ridiculously, at that time it would have been possible to consider him as important only insofar as he'd influenced Saramago.

Not to pick holes in your review, which I think is very intelligent. And as I say, I'm not really a fan of Jakob von Gunten. But I dispute the suggestion that it's a waste of time reading lesser known texts. How dull my reading would be if that were so!

What a review! Liked it. Specially the problem mentioned about what to do with the fact that clerk was taken from somewhere else.