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Quite an oddity; it took me a while to decide whether I liked it or not; it’s quite abstract and the protagonist isn’t someone that I would immediately warm to. The novel is written in the first person. Jakob is from a good family, with money and possibly titled who decides to go to the big city (Berlin) and join a school for servants (much as Walser did) called the Benjamenta Institute. The only teaching members we meet are the Principal and his sister.
The book is in diary form and consists of Jakob’s reflections and his philosophy; and also something of the philosophy of being a servant and being invisible with appropriate humility. Jakob is highly self-critical (sometimes irritatingly so) and there were times I was reminded of Uriah Heep. Walser’s influences are not easy to pin down. His intensely self critical nature has been compared to Rousseau in the Confessions and to a Dostoyevskian character. One of his translators has argued that Jakob has some similarities to characters in German folk tales (Brothers Grimm); the hero who braves the castle and wins the day against the odds. But victory is bittersweet because at the end Jakob is still back in the real world. Kafka was a fan and it is easy to see why and to see shades of The Castle in particular.
Jakob’s odd combination of humility and arrogance and his philosophy sometimes feel unsettling and contradictory; there are clear Nietzschean references and yet Walser is also analysing the middle class/bourgeois psyche which will have such an influence on German history in the early twentieth century. The elevation of the banal and the ultimate discovery by Jakob that at the heart it is all hollow and meaningless; the mysterious inner chambers are not all they seem; neither are the Benjamenta’s.
The foreshadowing of Nazism in characters like Kraus is startling; as is the amused tolerance of those in authority; there is a level of madness about it, but it is so simple, at times amusing; but also sad given Walser’s later descent into madness. Pretty much nothing happens on the surface, but Jakob has a hard time living with himself. A later poem by Walser sums it up;

I would wish it on no one to be me.
Only I am capable of bearing myself.
To know so much, to have seen so much, and
To say nothing, just about nothing