"Incidentally, I still owe you money, don't I, and I'm almost glad of this. Exterior ties can preserve the life of inner bonds."

This book made me smile almost throughout. The humor in it is so soft and enjoyable, it doesn't take you hostage. It's like a light breeze. The inner and outer dialogues of Joseph Marti, the main character, reflects the little noodle in the human cavity that vacillates constantly between being content/dutiful/grateful/polite and being indignant/rebellious/proud/angry. The book essentially has no plot except for these tiny changes in mood, like the changes in weather, but oh is it well written, with such joy and lightness and humor. I love Robert Walser more with every passing book.

"Mercantile coups are, as a rule, most successful when they are initiated telephonically."

Could not get into it at all

I was going to give this book 3 stars until I came to the ending, which I found I liked so much that it merited an extra half-star or star. Since half-stars aren't a thing on goodreads, I thought I'd be generous and just bump it up to 4 stars.

The main issue I had with this book is that I felt like about 75 pages of it could have been cut or trimmed down, because NOTHING happened in the. That really killed the overall momentum of the book for me, and made it a lot harder for me to want to finish this. Not that 300 pages is a long read, but this really feels like it could have been a good deal shorter and still kept the best bits.

I found myself feeling really sympathetic to Joseph after a while, which caught me by surprise. His loyalty to the Toblers is misguided, in my opinion, but genuine and understandable. He thinks himself a proper adult, but it's very clear from his occasional fits of irritability and his slavish loyalty to Herr Tobler that he's still got some growing up to do. I was in a similar point in my life a few years ago, at the same age as Joseph is in the novel, 24, and I also threw my devotion into a job that didn't merit it.

Another positive aspect of this book is that I feel like Joseph is a real flesh-and-blood character because he's got a very realistic balance of strengths and weaknesses. He's loyal, but stubbornly so. He's smart enough, but prone to somewhat cringe-inducing monologues about things he doesn't actually know that much about. He feels not only like someone I've gotten to know, but someone who actually exists in the real world.

I'm happy to have toughed out the slower bits, and I can honestly recommend this book. I'm happier having read it.

Watching a Train Wreck

Essential reading for the aspiring entrepreneur; even more so for his or her partner. Over a six month period, the protagonist, Joseph, observes the disintegration of a family driven to penury by its obsessive paterfamilias. Joseph watches as all the emotional and financial resources of the family are consumed by a business project. Having recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2814827020), I am struck by the commonality of experience related in books written a century apart.

In The Assistant, the role of Kingsolver’s fundamentalist African missionary is played by a Swiss German engineer; but the personalities and the sociology in which the action takes place are identical in the two books. Both centre on compulsive, irresponsible males who inflict their personal ‘visions’ on their families. The wives are aware of both the incompetence and neurotic drive of their husbands; yet they choose to continue their loyalty and support. The effects of this complicity in the delusions of male dominance are tragic in both cases.

One can only marvel how deeply ingrained this deference to male desire for whatever it is they think they want - money, power, reputation, redemption - in our culture. It is shameful, not so much because it exists but because it is so persistent despite widespread publicity about its destructiveness. Ever since fiction has been widely available to a literate population, the same theme of the exploitation of families by dominant males is consistently described.

Yet males continue to provide the excuse of ‘doing it for the family’. And females continue to believe the male rhetoric, oblivious to both the selfishness and the risk implied by such a rationale. Men lie. They start by lying to themselves about things like ambition, and personal fulfilment, and making the world a better place. They’re encouraged to do so by other men who want to justify their own lies. And when no one calls their bluff, they lie to everyone else, particularly their families.

Apparently, given a chance, women do the same: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2415023796

I don't really know what to say about this book. Sometimes with a book in translation, you wonder if something gets lost in translation, or if the characters are just so different from you that you can't relate to them. This book was like that. I found it interesting enough, but I didn't really relate to the characters and couldn't understand where they were coming from. I've had this with a lot of the Russians before, particularly Dostoyevsky. The character would react suddenly, yelling or lashing out, and then a minute later, be very calm.

That said, I found the story of the inventor running up huge debts with no way of paying them and the whole family pretending that this was sustainable interesting. But since I couldn't really relate to the characters, I didn't feel invested in the story in a way that would gain the book a higher rating.