Jakob Von Gunten - Robert Wasler
Wasler is one of those writers I have become steadily more aware of over the past couple of years as his name cropped up in blog after blog. He was published in his lifetime and is often cited as an influence, both during his lifetime and afterwards. Kafka and Hesse, it is often mentioned, were fans. He is also cited as an outsider artist, spending much of the latter part of his life in asylums, and producing work written in pencil in a miniscule script which wasn't published until long after his death.
I have just finished reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger and it seems to me that the two books share a lot. They both deal largely with the tension between renunciation, pride and desire. They are both narrated by people who are on a knife edge, physically or mentally.
