“Who knows Joseph Tassël, the young writer from the beginning of the last century who made daydreaming “a personal and serious profession” and who, from boarding school to hospice, gradually escaped from existence, fading into insanity like Robert Walser, whom he so closely resembles? Who knows him? No one, of course, since, however intense and moving the destiny of this fragile soul, infatuated with literature as with an absolute, however moving the events of his inner life as revealed in his diary, his notebooks, his letters, Joseph Tassel never existed... This very paradox constitutes the strange success of Benoît Reiss: it is rare that a being of paper acquires such a presence, reaches such a truth. It is to the point that, leaving the present biography, one cannot accept that it is a fiction. We cannot console ourselves, no doubt, with being deprived forever of the work of a Joseph Tassël!”
—Jean-Pierre Siméon