[In the following review, Spycher focuses on the identity of the narrator-protagonist of Meßmers Gedanken, noting the individual's relationship to the narrative.]

As the title [Meßmers Gedanken] indicates, we are offered a (three-part) collection of aphoristically and often poetically expressed thoughts by a man named Tassilo Herbert Meßmer. Meßmer himself and a “narrator” have taken irregular turns in noting them down. The narrator's identity remains totally unknown, Meßmer's almost totally. Their mutual relationship is not explained; the narrator may be the editor. Meßmer claims to be an “optician” but would prefer to be a carrier of far-reaching messages; he must be a real or a would-be poet. He is also a traveler (the USA, Ireland, West Germany, Switzerland are fleetingly mentioned). From his fifty-fourth to his sixty-third year, however, he sits still in his room and subsequently dies suddenly, without (this was his own desire) being missed by anybody.

Basically, it seems best to regard Meßmer's thoughts as disembodied emanations of a shadowy individual. Here are a few typical samples: “I yearn to be like a wish. I would like to stand on the threshold. A day before daybreak. I wish I had not yet existed”; “For lack of urgency, it has not been determined what he is supposed to do. He vacillates without moving. He is a tethered animal which acts as if it wanted to be free, while it relishes eating prisoners’ food”; “Not to agree to what goes on around you. But not to be recalcitrant either. Not very much, at any rate. You should appear to comply.” Meßmer suffers from an “unhappy consciousness” (cf. Kierkegaard). His “ideal” would be “equally extreme self-exposure and self-concealment. Hence a language of self-exposure-concealment.” He keeps anxiously waiting for a rich and beautiful life, yet “in conclusion, I can say that I am empty.” Indeed, Meßmer's thoughts are not very enlightening or even merely provocative; many of them are murky (“Meßmer's goal: the 4th level of autobiography”) or muddled, indecisive or self-contradictory (“At least he wants to be a bird on a heated branch, completely protected and free”), and occasionally pseudowitty (“When I put on my cap, I am, thinks Meßmer”).

Meßmer remotely resembles the protagonist Gallistl of the first part of Walser's novel Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit (1972), though Gallistl is a figure with far more “profile” and is far more articulate about his spiritually sick condition. (He also finally finds a solution to his problems, however unconvincing that solution may be.) Even structurally, the book is puzzling. Do the sequences of Meßmer's thoughts have any significance? Or in what respects are the three parts different from one another?