I read Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser

It's hard to describe what I find so singular and blissful about reading Walser. He's so unique, in the slightly enraging way where you know it's impossible for you to write like that. The individual sentences within his prose are like the winding rants of a Bernhard protagonist that turn back, diverge, negate themselves to return to or deny their premise etc., but put into the subjectivity of an excitable pervert rather than a miserable old bastard. His writing captures the sense you get sometimes, when you're just on a walk and kind of overwhelmed with all the fractal sensory detail and moving societal parts around you, that life is like a big huge rich layer cake constantly, though you can only intermittently gain access to that feeling.

This one is about going to a school to become a servant, in terms of direct plot. Plot is used loosely here because, like Kafka, Walser really operates well in the realm of presenting surreal logics of settings and characters, and weird conceptual leaps, in a very "plain," matter-of-fact way. So it's based partly on the fact that he did this in life but also kind of a philosophical representation for the wild jittery excessiveness of consciousness and wanting to put it to a particular end, becoming submissive, because you're not really sure what you want to do on your own. The state of youth maybe, but it can come back at any point in your life I think!