…but Robert Walser did it about seven decades before I was born. If he didn’t, I would love to take a crack at writing an episodic novel about young man who goes to a boarding school for those training to be servants, where all the teachers are missing (they’re sleeping in a dark room together), and describe how he struggles to resist the affections and favor of the headmaster (and accept those of the headmaster’s tragic sister), while continually considering the love and admiration he harbors for the stern roommate he hates.

It took me too long to read Walser, but I’m glad I finally have.  I have a particularly affinity for these Twentieth Century modernist novelists from Europe whose legacies call in sick from the canon from time to time – Flann O’Brien, Italo Svevo, Bernhard, etc.