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Who here has read anything by this failure of an author?
He's called the missing link between Kliest and Kafka, but I'm not really seeing it. He was a favorite of the many major German prose writers, Kafka, Hesse, and Mann, but he himself died unknown in a mental asylum.
I'm reading Jakob von Gunten right now, and the closest thing i can compare it to is Tom Sawyer and Huckelberry Finn. It's childish, which I think is just kind of an excuse to insert a ton of aphorisms.
Also, towards the end of his life, he completed a bunch of coded manuscripts in tiny handwriting that haven't been decoded and translated until 2011. This kind of interests me because he suffered from auditory hallucinations during the part of his life during which he wrote it.
Has anybody read him? What do you think?
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>>8643742
>comparing Jakob von Gunten to Tom Sawyer
>calls author a failure cuz muh complex prose lmao
congrats son, you know shit about literature
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>>8643817
I don't call him a failure, he was a failure, financially. if i thought he was a failure as a writer, i wouldn't have made this thread about him. Despite a surge of popularity early in his career, his mental illness and other personal issues made his works disconnected from the regular readers, leaving him to die in obscurity. Furthermore, the "resurgence" of his works that came with his English translations pale in comparison to Kakfa and Melville and other authors who were championed by similar academics.
And his prose isn't complex at all, and i don't know where you got that from.
They're both told in first person from a child's point of view, both the protagonists run away, both the books pretty much consist of their experiences and observations. i know Mark Twain wrote to capture that southern dialect, but the two books are rather similar when you account for cultural differences.
But what do you think of it?
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>>8643742
He's kind of a more stylistically inventive version of Kafka. I've only read his short stories. By the time I got to his novels I was already tired of that sort of thing. I would recommend him to those going through the stages of nihilism. Luckily, I'm done with that :)
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>>8643742
I have Von Gunten and his selected stories, but I've only read the former. With the exception of a few highlights, like the talk Jakob has with his brother in the cafe and the ending, I thought it was underwhelming, nor do I remember much else. I've only heard good things about him from others though.
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>>8644146
Oh yeah, and boy does he love his commas. It seems he tried to use as many as possible, splintering what would be normally be a simple sentence into parenthetical clauses which each accented the one before it. If I knew anything about lit I'd say something about his style, but idk. At least it wasn't too distracting.
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>>8643742
he didnt die unknown, he was very popular
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