An employment agency places 24-year-old Joseph Marti with Karl Tobler, an irascible engineer whose inventions are novel only in their defiant lack of commercial appeal. Raised in poverty, Marti quickly adjusts to the bourgeois pleasures offered at the palatial hilltop Tobler house. He is fed excessively well, entertained with nightly card games, and given a room overlooking an alpine lake. Though conscientious about his work, he manages to do very little of it; in return, he receives only a promise of a forthcoming salary. For the easygoing Marti, it seems a fair trade: "He was satisfied by the idyllic surroundings, with what was there. Clouds and breezes were still drifting about the Tobler residence, and as long as these entities were of a mind to remain there, the assistant was too unencumbered by thoughts of departure."

Swiss writer Robert Walser doesn't explore themes so much as he establishes a psychological stage on which they can emerge. In The Assistant (recently translated by Susan Bernofsky), mood and texture do the heavy lifting. The scene alternates between the claustrophobic comforts of the Tobler house and the enchanting Swiss lake country. With the cramped basement workshop cluttered with dead-end projects and creditors circling the house like wolves, Marti escapes from the numbing futility of his labor into the dream-like alpine landscape and scattered memories of his past. Walser passes through one enlightening digression after another, and plot points often emerge with little foreshadowing only to be obscured just as quickly by Marti's reveries.

Less infuriating than intriguing, The Assistant might be a book about the inhumanity of capitalism. It might also be a book about the importance (and pitfalls) of self-worth, or it might be a document of literary art brut (Walser spent much of his later years in mental institutions). The Assistant's genius, though, is that it achieves all these things without ever appearing to aspire to greatness.

-Rob Tocalino