Jakob von Gunten is a first-person account told by its titular protagonist, a young man of noble background who runs away from home and decides to spend the rest of his life serving others.
Walser based the novel on his own experiences: upon arriving in Berlin in 1905 he attended a school for servants,[1] and served as a butler the following winter at the castle of Dambrau in Upper Silesia.
His brother Johann is a well-known, established artist, who cultivates a bourgeois lifestyle and moves in elite circles.
Jakob runs away from home in order to escape the overbearing shadow of his father, an alderman.
Due to a lack of teaching staff, the pupils are taught by the headmaster's sister, Lisa Benjamenta.
The teaching predominantly consists of learning-by-heart from one of the institute's brochures with the title "What is the aim of Benjamenta’s School for Boys?"
At first he rebels, walks into his office and demands his money back, resenting the poor quality of the education.
Jakob later gets mixed up in a fight and receives a hit to the head from the headmaster who does not ascertain who was initially responsible.
Nobel Prize laureate J. M. Coetzee originally published his review—a reappreciation of an almost forgotten classic—in The New York Review of Books Vol.47, No.17 (2 November 2000).