Selected Stories

by Robert Walser, Christopher Middleton (Translator), Susan Sontag (Preface by)

How to place the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a humble genius who possessed one of the most elusive and surprising sensibilities in modern literature? Walser is many a Paul Klee in words, maker of droll, whimsical, tender, and heartbreaking verbal artifacts; an inspiration to such very different writers as Kafka and W.G. Sebald; an amalgam, as Susan Sontag suggests in her preface to this volume, of Stevie Smith and Samuel Beckett.

This collection gathers forty-two of Walser's stories. Encompassing everything from journal entries, notes on literature, and biographical sketches to anecdotes, fables, and visions, it is an ideal introduction to this fascinating writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."

Response to a Request
Flower Days
Trousers
Two Strange Stories
Balloon Journey
Kleist in Thum
The Job Application
The Boat
A Little Ramble
Helbling's Story
The Little Berliner
Nervous
The Walk
So! "I've Got You"
Nothing at All
Kienast
Poests
Frau Wilke
The Street
Snowdrops
Winter
The She-Owl
Knocking
Titus
Vladimir
Parisian Newspapers
The Monkey
Dostoevsky's Idiot
Am I Dreaming?
The Little Tree
Stork and Porcupine
A Contribution to the Celebration of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
A Sort of Speech
A Letter to Therese Breitbach
A Village Tale
The Aviator
The Pimp
Masters and Workers
Essay on Freedom
A Biedermeier Story
The Honeymoon
Thoughts on Cezanne

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, German Literature, Literature, Classics, 20th Century, Walking

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

Robert Walser, a German-Swiss prose writer and novelist, enjoyed high repute among a select group of authors and critics in Berlin early in his career, only to become nearly forgotten by the time he committed himself to the Waldau mental clinic in Bern in January 1929. Since his death in 1956, however, Walser has been recognized as German Switzerland’s leading author of the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps Switzerland’s single significant modernist. In his homeland he has served as an emboldening exemplar and a national classic during the unparalleled expansion of German-Swiss literature of the last two generations.

Walser’s writing is characterized by its linguistic sophistication and animation. His work exhibits several sets of tensions or contrasts: between a classic modernist devotion to art and a ceaseless questioning of the moral legitimacy and practical utility of art; between a spirited exuberance in style and texture and recurrent reflective melancholy; between the disparate claims of nature and culture; and between democratic respect for divergence in individuals and elitist reaction to the values of the mass culture and standardization of the industrial age.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Walser is very rich in characters – there are many of every type… He sympathizes with the men living purposeful and spiritual life and he ridicules the empty ones who are nothing but passersby in this world.

My name is Helbling and I am telling my own story because it would probably not be written down by anybody else. With mankind become sophisticated, there can be nothing curious nowadays about a person, like me, sitting down and starting to write his own story. It is short, my story, for I am still young, and it will not be completed, for I shall probably go on living for a very long time. The striking thing about me is that I am a very ordinary person, almost exaggeratedly so. I am one of the multitude, and that is what I find so strange.

Robert Walser is always capable to see the most curious sides of life and human nature – he is ironic but he is empathic.

Sundays Kleist likes, and market days also, when everything ripples and swarms with blue smocks and the costumes of the peasant women, on the road, and on the narrow main street. There, on this narrow street, by the pavement, the wares are stacked in stone vaults and on flimsy stalls. Grocers announce their cheap treasures with beguiling country cries. And usually on such a market day there shines the most brilliant, the hottest, the silliest sun. Kleist likes to be pushed hither and thither by the bright bland throng of folk. Everywhere there is the smell of cheese. Into the better shops go the serious and sometimes beautiful countrywomen, cautiously, to do their shopping. Many of the men have pipes in their mouths. Pigs, calves, and cows are hauled past.

To see and to understand the entire world it is quite enough to have a short walk, one just must learn to observe every tiny detail… But this wonderful skill is available only to the most subtle artists, poets and thinkers.

Snowdrops whisper all kinds of things. They bring back to mind Snow White, who in the mountains found a friendly welcome from the dwarfs. They remind one of roses because they are different. Everything always reminds one of its opposite.
Just wait. The good will come. Goodness is always closer to us than we think. Patience brings roses. This old, good saying occurred to me when recently I saw snowdrops.

For those who can see through the nature of the ordinary things happiness is easy…

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The majority of stories are brief kaleidoscopic sketches full of opulent surreal imagery…

Once there was a man and on his shoulders he had, instead of a head, a hollow pumpkin. This was no great help to him. Yet he still wanted to be Number One. That’s the sort of person he was. For a tongue he had an oak leaf hanging from his mouth, and his teeth were cut out with a knife. Instead of eyes, he had just two round holes. Back of the holes, two candle stumps flickered. Those were his eyes. They didn’t help him see far. And yet he said his eyes were better than anyone’s, the braggart.

The style is simultaneously subtly ironic and lushly poetic…

No noise, no sound. Everything is wrapped in a black, sweet silence. The stars tremble high above in the sky and also upward from far below out of the sky which lies on the surface of the water. The water is the friend of the moon, it has pulled it down to itself, and now they kiss, the water and the moon, like boyfriend and girlfriend. The beautiful moon has sunk into the water like a daring young prince into a flood of peril.

The Walk is a centerpiece and the longest tale… Several visits and indoor meetings… A vista of casual outdoor scenes and impressions…

In my bright yellow English suit, which I had received as a present, I really seemed to myself, I must frankly admit, a great lord and grand seigneur, a marquis strolling up and down his park, though it was only a semi-rural, semi-suburban, neat, modest, nice little poor-quarter and country road I walked on, and on no account a noble park, as I have been so arrogant as to suppose, a presumption I gently withdraw, because all that is park-like is pure invention and does not fit here at all.

We promenade the streets not just to see others but also to show ourselves.

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories are delightful but you must have a penchant for the wistful and the highly discursive to engage with them. W.G. Sebald said that Walser's sentences seem to disappear from the mind as you read them. Susan Sontag adored him, especially his novel Jakob von Gunten, such is the buoyancy of his prose, his admirably light touch.

Those who read mysteries and cop stories all the time probably will not be able to abide Walser. For there's no plot, just character. Moreover, as Walser himself puts it in "A Village Tale":

Never in all my years as a writer have I written a tale in which a person, struck by a bullet, falls down. This is the first time in my work that a person has croaked.

Recommend with zeal.

[PGR Nair · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Warning: This is a pretty long review; more of a labour of love than a love of long-windedness)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust

If I were asked which writer in 2015 should get the maximum attention among serious classic readers, I would name ROBERT WALSER. So let me declare at least to myself 2015 as the year of Reading Robert Walser. It was couple of months ago, during my bath room reading of Elias Canetti’s amazing book “The Human Province” (Well, this is that has solidly stayed with me for 20 years and one which I constantly return to) that I read a short reference to Robert Walser. I would like to reproduce a part of it below:

Robert Walser’s special characteristic as a writer is that he never formulates his motives. He is the most camouflaged of all writers. He is always well off, he is always delighted by everything. But his enthusiasm is cold, since it leaves out one part of himself, and that is why it is sinister. For him, everything is external nature, and the essential thing about it, its innermost being, fear, was something he denied all his life.

His writings are an unflagging attempt at hushing his fear. He escapes everywhere before too much fear gathers in him (his wandering life), and to save himself, he often changes into something subservient and small. His deep and instinctive distaste for everything “lofty” , for everything that has rank and privilege, makes him an essential writer of our time, which is choking on power. One hesitates calling him a “great” writer according to normal usage, nothing is so repugnant to him as “greatness”. It is only the brilliance of greatness to which he submits, and not its demand. His pleasure is to contemplate the brilliance without taking part in it. One cannot read him without being ashamed of everything that was important to one in external life, and thus he is a particular saint, not one according to outmoded and deflated prescriptions.

Imagine the shame a serious reader has when he discovers Kafka for the first time at the age of 50 and that is what I felt when I read Robert Walser. How come none of my trusted literary friends ever spoke to me about him? Are they also equally ignorant about this writer as I am? I am now in a feverish state of mind to devour everything he has written to make up for the lost time. I started with “Berlin Stories” and then immediately moved to this collection, which I believe is the best introductory book for anyone who wants to have a flavor of this truly great and original writer.

Robert Walser (1878–1956) was born into a German-speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while writing his poems, novels, and vast numbers of the “prose pieces” that became his hallmark. In 1933 he was confined to a sanatorium, falsely diagnosed as schizophrenic, and he lived there for the rest of the 23 years till his death on a snow track while out on one of his usual long walks, on Christmas Day, in 1956.

During his stay in the sanatorium, Robert Walser continued to write many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form written with tiny ant-like pencil markings a millimeter high, came to light only after the author’s death . The microscripts were in time discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of antique German script: a whole story was deciphered on the back of a business card. Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky, two ardent proponents of Walser, painstakingly translated most of his stories including the microscripts during this decade.

This selection of stories, fluidly translated by the poet Christopher Middleton, carries an elegant introduction by Susan Sontag. Perhaps the following statement of Sontag marks the right place for Walser in the literary history:

Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, as literature’s present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly.

Most of the stories in the story fall half way between essay and fantasy. Instead of using plot, Walser links events, transforming everything and anything into an art best described as a kind of ‘tamed surrealism’. Dreamlike juxtapositions and humorous asides abound to suggest the discontinuity of both the character’s and the author’s personality and the world. Right after the preface by Susan Sontag, there is a quote by Walser about what kind of writer he is:

I am a kind of artisan novelist. A writer of novellas I certainly am not. If I am well-disposed, that’s to say, feeling good, I tailor, cobble, weld, plane, knock, hammer, or nail together lines the content of which people understand at once. If you liked, you could call me a writer who goes to work with a lathe. My writing is wallpapering. One or two kindly people venture to think of me as a poet, which indulgence and manners allow me to concede. My prose pieces are, to my mind, nothing more nor less than parts of a long, plotless, realistic story. For me, the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself. (Robert Walser)

What attracts the reader to even the smallest pieces in this collection is that you find a gleam of truth in many sentences that is borne out of a torrid exposure and observation of life. Like a sponge, he absorbs and reproduces the quirky behavior of his fellow beings with utmost candor and clarity. Never does he attempt to grumble or taint his observations with abstruse philosophical meanderings and irony is rarely encountered.

The erratic oddity of his comic and anecdotal yet deeply disquieting prose is felt from the beginning. The book opens with an interesting expressionistic piece titled, “Response to a Request”. "It is a monologue by a pantomime actor which starts out mild and closes on a mad scream. Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." His frustration with clerkly existence is evident in the deadpan but thoroughly hilarious story “Job Application”:

Esteemed Gentlemen,

I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. . . . Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-reaching sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. . . . Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream?—I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid.

Walser is adept in switching from sweetness to sarcasm and back to sweetness again as in the case above. I had thought that the most expressive expression of ‘angst’ begins with Kafka. It is now a well-known fact that Kafka was deeply influenced by Walser and perfected it in many of his wonderful novels and stories. Perhaps such anxiety, as seen in Walser, must be embedded in our DNA, in the memory of our blood, as the ancient response to the grand pulse of life.

What is distinctive about this artless artist is his sharp observation of the inconsequential. He is not only a chronicler of the ordinary but one who sees extraordinary merits in the mundane things and derives a peculiar pleasure from it. His writings are unpretentious to the core and every sentence carries a whiff of oxygen. As William Gass said- "To his eye, everything is equal; to his heart, everything is fresh and astonishing; to his mind, everything presents a pleasant puzzle. Diversion is his principal direction, whim his master, the serendipitous substance of his daily routine."

Walser spent a good deal of his life on foot and in no hurry. “The Walk”, the longest story of about 43 pages, is a cardinal piece in this collection and is a marvelous piece of writing I have come across in recent times. The reader can perhaps start right away with this piece as it contains all the characteristic traits and techniques of Walser. As Bernofsky remarks, “The Walk is an episodic comedy with darkness at the edges, its gravity becoming apparent only gradually as one follows the narrator’s perambulations.”

The Walk starts as a normal walk through a rustic country side in a provincial Swiss town. Along the way he encounters a professor, a “foremost authority” and “incontrovertible power in person” whose mouth is “juridically clamped tight”; a bookseller who offers him, upon request, a “universally admired, thunderously applauded masterpiece” ; a bank clerk who informs him that a group of benefactors has credited his account with a considerable sum, an “alleviation of a delicate nature”, that he most assuredly needs; an encounter with a gaudy Bakery shop which he describes as “such golden inscriptional barbarities, which impress upon our rustic surrounds the seal of greed, moneygrubbing, and a miserable coarsening of the soul”. He then bumps into a giant named Tomzack who crosses his path, an outcast from whose eyes “there broke a glare of grief from underworlds and overworlds, and indescribable pain spoke from each of his slack and weary movements.” He then takes a halt at his benefactress Frau Abei’s home who serves him with an overabundant lunch and, in an absurd scene that reminds one of Ionesco, continues to press and finally threaten to eat even after he’s well past the bursting point, assuring him that “there is no possibility that you will leave this table before you have eaten up and polished off everything that I have cut, and will cut, off for you”. This is followed by a stop at post office to send a mail filled with diatribe to an important personality. He then visits his tailor who stitches , in his opinion, a disproportionate coat and describes him as a tailor completely saturated with a sense of his own efficiency. All through this walk, he pleads the reader to be patient and excuse him for his long-winded dialogues. There is a kind hypersensitivity in many of his comments and reactions evoked during the walk. The funny thing is that the narrator who vents a fulsome dialogue can immediately shrink into a mouse and plead with groveling humility and self-effacement. I cite the following passage when he enters the bookshop:

“May I,” I asked with diffidence, “take a moment to acquaint myself with, and taste the qualities of, the most sterling and serious, and at the same time of course also the most read and most quickly acknowledged and purchased, reading matter? You would pledge me in high degree to unusual gratitude were you to be so extremely kind as to lay generously before me that book which, as certainly nobody can know so precisely as only you yourself, has found the highest place in the estimation of the reading public, as well as that of the dreaded and thence doubtless flatteringly circumvented critics, and which further-more has made them merry. You cannot conceive how keen I am to learn at once which of all these books or works of the pen piled high and put on show here is the favorite book in question, the sight of which in all probability, as I must most energetically suppose, will make me at once a joyous and enthusiastic purchaser. My longing to see the favorite author of the cultivated world and his admired, thunderously applauded masterpiece, and, as I said, probably also at once to buy the same, aches and ripples through my every limb. May I most politely ask you to show me this most successful book, so that this desire, which has seized my entire being, may acknowledge itself gratified, and cease to trouble me?” “Certainly,” said the bookseller. (The Walk)

There is great sadness and loneliness in the stories of Walser and in the midst of an animated narrative, he can suddenly slip in heart breaking prose. The Walk itself takes a somber turn towards the end when the narrator himself ponders on his wasted life at the end his walk, which is metaphorically a walk through his life:

I felt the need to lie down somewhere, and since a friendly, cozy little place by the lakeside was nearby, I made myself comfortable, somewhat tired as I was, on the soft ground under the artless branches of a tree. As I looked at earth and air and sky the melancholy unquestioning thought came to me that I was a poor prisoner between heaven and earth, that all men were miserably imprisoned in this way, that for all men there was only the one dark path into the other world, the path down into the pit, into the earth, that there was no other way into the other world than that which led through the grave. “So then everything, everything, all this rich life, the friendly, thoughtful colors, this delight, this joy and pleasure in life, all these human meanings, family, friend, and beloved, this bright, tender air full of divinely beautiful images, houses of fathers, houses of mothers, and dear gentle roads, must one day pass away and die, the high sun, the moon, and the hearts and eyes of men.” For a long time I thought of this, and asked those people whom perhaps I might have injured to forgive me. For a long time I lay there in unclear thought, until I remembered the girl again, who was so beautiful and fresh with youth, and had such soft, good, pure eyes. I vividly imagined how charming was her childish, pretty mouth, how pretty her cheeks, and how with its melodious sweetness her bodily form had enchanted me, how I had asked her a question a while ago, how in her doubt and disbelief her lovely eyes had looked away, and how she had said no when I asked her if she believed in my sincere love, affection, surrender, and tenderness. The situation had obliged her to travel, and she had gone away. Perhaps I would still have had time to convince her that I meant well with her, that her dear person was important to me, and that I had many beautiful reasons for wanting to make her happy, and thus myself happy also; but I had thought no more of it, and she went away. Why then the flowers? “Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?” I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand. I had risen up, to go home; for it was late now, and everything was dark.

The second most impressive piece that I would rate in this collection is titled, “ Kleist in Thun”. In this one, the narrator imagines to himself how the Prussian writer Heinrich von Kleist, then twenty-five, might have lived during the spring and summer of 1802 in a villa on a small island in the Aar River near the town of Thun. Susan Sontag in her introduction states, Wasler often writes from the point of view of a casualty of the romantic visionary imagination. Kleist is overwhelmed and disturbed by his own response to what appears to him as the artificiality of his surroundings, as though it were from a photo album. The changes in the weather and the seasons are portrayed as Kleist struggles with his own historical writings which he is forced to destroy over and over. This piece portrays with sensitivity Kleist's struggle for the peaceful moments when he can feel again the outright happiness of a child. The final passages in this story are deeply affecting.

Some remarkable stories in this collection like “A Little Ramble” and “She-owl” are limited to just a page. Here is a short endearing piece where a she-owl monologues on her life:

“People say I’m ugly. If they only knew what smiles I feel in my soul, they’d not run from me in fright any more. Yet they don’t see into the interior, they stop at the body, the clothes. Once I was young and pretty, I might say, but that makes it sound as if I pine for the past, and that is not my way. The she-owl, who once practiced growing big, endures the course and change of time tranquilly, she finds herself in every present moment.”( She-owl)

Reading a piece like "Helbling's Story" suggests what in Walser Kafka must have found so intriguing: ""I think that one listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom. When I stand in the office, my limbs slowly turn to wood, which one longs to set fire to, so that it might burn: desk and man, one with time." The “Ballon story” is another arresting one. One amazingly tender tale in this collection is titled “Frau Wilke”. It is about the relationship between a poor young poet and an older woman who lets him a furnished room and shortly afterward falls ill. The woman is completely alone, with nothing to eat, and no one to care for her. The narrator comes to realize that he is her only link to humankind. Very little happens. Then she dies:

One afternoon soon after her death, I entered her empty room, into which the good evening sun was shining, gladdening it with rose-bright, gay and soft colors. There I saw on the bed the things which the poor lady had till recently worn, her dress, her hat, her sunshade and her umbrella, and, on the floor, her small delicate boots. The strange sight of them made me unspeakably sad, and my peculiar state of mind made it seem to me almost that I had died myself, and life in all its fullness, which had often appeared so huge and beautiful, was thin and poor to the point of breaking. All things past, all things vanishing away, were more close to me than ever. For a long time I looked at Frau Wilke’s possessions, which now had lost their mistress and lost all purpose, and at the golden room, glorified by the smile of the evening sun, while I stood there motionless, not understanding anything anymore. Yet, after standing there dumbly for a time, I was gratified and grew calm. Life took me by the shoulder and its wonderful gaze rested on mine. The world was as living as ever and beautiful as at the most beautiful times. I quietly left the room and went out into the street. (Frau Wilke)

Although Walser’s style is, at first glance, comic, even farcical, his comedy serves a double purpose. It lightens the satirical thrust of his fiction and protects, in art if not in real life, his all too vulnerable characters from a world they perceive as a threat. These characters are, like the stories themselves, odd and distinctly modern lot. They are comical and mythical as if from a fairy tale. His writes as if to obliterate every beautiful image that he carefully carves. As Walter Benjamin said of Walser: “The moment he takes a pen to hand, he is seized by a desperado mood. Everything seems lost to him, a gush of words comes pouring out in which each sentence has the sole purpose of rendering the previous one forgotten.”

Herman Hesee remarked on Walser –“If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place.” I cannot endorse it more. It is a pleasure to encounter such a humble genius as Walser who openly confesses that he “breathes in the lower regions”. I pray the modern authors who pander power, popularity and publicity, including those in GR, listen to him.

[RandomAnthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the author’s bio on the inner front cover:

Robert Walser (1878-1956) was born in Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium—where he remained for the rest of his life. “I am not here to write,” Walser said, “but to be mad.”

Meet the first book I’ve read in a long time worthy of five stars.

Robert Walser’s Selected Stories is, quite simply, a jaw-dropping revelation. Walser is both aware of the ridiculousness of social interaction and his own place in the world and at the same time respectful or at least ambivalent concerning the idea that not everyone may share his perceptions. He is the kind of person who could probably size up a room in thirty seconds but would be polite enough to avoid blurting out his perceptions for everyone to hear. Then he would cut out the back door, head to his cheap room, and write. I LOVE this guy. Most of the stories run three or so pages but a few run as many as fifty. Also included is a conversation about love between a stork and a porcupine. I’m not kidding.

The longest stories, particularly “The Walk”, involve the narrator’s extensive solo wanderings through town and country. That story evidences both his humor and his darkness. The narrator enters a bookstore and asks the clerk to see the book everyone is reading before rejecting said book as unworthy of his time. A bank gives him, out of nowhere, 1,000 francs, and he tries to convince a woman she could be a famous singer. Later, however, the walk ends as darkness falls with visions of an “old forsaken man” and flowers falling out of the narrator’s hand. “Kleist in Thun” documents Kleist’s descent into madness. I don’t want to make Walser sound like a crazy ranter; he’s not. He’s more like a guy who knows too much and communicates what’s just below the surface in those of us who can relate but manage to function in daily life better than Walser could.

The first time I heard The Smiths, at fourteen, I felt less alone in the world. I felt like the scripts running in my mind were slightly validated because some guy in Manchester, England sang lyrics that spoke to what I was trying to say but couldn’t articulate. And people were listening. And since people were listening I thought there must be more people like me out there and maybe what I’m feeling and thinking is not useless, aberrant, and deathly. Without that experience (and I know some of you hate The Smiths, so feel free to insert your favorite band here) I doubt I would have emerged from high school with any sense of self or future. I haven’t had that feeling, the feeling I got when I first heard The Smiths, in a long time, probably since first experiencing eels’ Electro-Shock Blues. And how often does that feeling occur when you’re nearing forty? Walser revitalized me, and that’s a gift. Thank you, Mr. Walser, thank you.

Reading Walser is rewarding hard work. He leans towards long sentences, piling on prepositional phrases, so be prepared to read some pages over a few times. Some stories, esp. near the end, left me feeling I missed something important. This book requires multiple readings. I felt tired by the time I finished.

If you need a contextual touchstone, well, go with Kafka. Apparently Walser influenced Mr. K., and the same outsider, isolated perspective permeates both authors' work. While Kafka focused more on the dead air of offices and small rooms, Walser walks out in the open and pretty much gives up on the office (except in “The Job Application” and "Helbing’s Story” both of which lead directly to Kafka’s world). Let me put it this way: If Kafka and David Foster Wallace met at a bar and had a contest to see who could make the other laugh or cry first, their stories would sound like Robert Walser’s.

I need to play the “I can’t do justice to this book” card in this review. And I also need to thank Young Matthew for pointing me in Walser’s direction. I owe you big time. Matty...

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just don't get Robert Walser. I want to. I really do. I mean, I've read a lot of the other reviews on this site (most of which should come with a mop and some wetnaps), and apparently anybody who ever reads this thing ascends immediately into the heavens with a pure, beatific light emanating from the nucleus of his soul while a thousand choirs erupt in a song so rapturous that its very vibrations elicit a cataclysmic orgasm in all its listeners. (In other words... I'll have what they're having.) So I sit there, reading this book, and... and... I don't know any other way to put it—I'm actually pressing my mind into it with an almost physical force. I can feel myself exerting all of my being—almost grunting, in fact—in a vain attempt to decipher that miraculous je ne sais quoi that makes everyone soil their trousers. Where is it? Where the fuck is it?! I start to panic—but no—I will not panic! This is all a practical joke, right? Allen Funt, come out from your hiding place... but not if you're dead, okay? I don't know how to concentrate on these words any harder and make them come alive. I feel as if my eyes are bulging out of my head like Barbara Bush's. I hope nobody's watching me. I mean... they've got to be kidding, right? The JFK conspiracy, and now this. The Walser conspiracy. It's not that Walser is even or especially bad; that would actually be interesting. It's just that he's almost nothing. A dandelion puff, scattered to the four winds—or how ever many winds there are. But here I am, still waiting for my orgasm. And waiting. Whom can I sue? I'm feeling litigious.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

He has in writing explicitly invited us along with him. He acknowledges that as a writer he is afraid of the reader and often apologizes to us throughout this fine collection of stories, notes, fragments. It is an interesting relationship between Walser and his reader. As a reader have we also become an Other to him, which signifies the possibility of criticism, humiliation, as when writing in his room he has become an Other to himself. When he leaves his writing room, if in this book he ever has, he takes the liberty to take an ironic, critical stance with others-the bookkeeper, banker, a gigantic unhappy man passing him on a country road. But generally the opening onto and opening himself to the country road is an extraordinary liberation in many of these pieces, of Walser freeing himself from himself. So floridly, sensually, done he even explains how to be there, to dedicate ourselves to this beloved scenery, nature, to surrender ourselves, so we too can partake in his overflowing joy, in his imagination, on the country road, or at the train station looking out on the verdant valley with its inviting small cottages. Walser is no simple pedestrian here. He is the explorer and at times the conquerer of the soul and its disparate parts coming together as one, where there is no Other.

In this collection Others abound. Sifting about him they act as both a source of desire and a source of fear.These conflictual feelings paralyze him, kindling his desolate loneliness and copious forms of isolation and depression. What is someone to do especially during these years? This paralysis is not a passing abstract concept. Walser indeed cannot make a decision, take a step forward. A shuffle in place is the most he hopes for. The early stories speak of little hope. Thun, is a story in itself worth reading the entire book its ending as sad as anything I've read, along with, The Walk. In order to live with such a sadness we find Walser speaking his stories, cataloging his life with words of whimsy, a mirth which does not seem out of place or stylized but comes from a capricious stance in a life constructed for survival. It is respected as such. At the same time its slight slice of irony makes it entertaining, touches our own need to laugh at our foibles, even horrors, to shape them more diminutive and thus within the possibility of being able to be handled. Walser opens his individual soul yet clearly spreads it across the universal

I would have given this book a full fledged 5 star rating but too many notes and fragments were included weighing the book down for me in the middle. So, a 4.5 This is the only collection of Walser's shorter works, many only one or two pages long, that I have read. Middleton has not only translated but made his selections and placed them in a chronological order shaping the work. I have no way of comparing this to other collections and translator's. It seems that the stories in the second half show a more facile optimistic Walser who though still with problems has accepted his conflicts, obsessions, and thus is somewhat more at peace with himself.It is fitting the book ends with Walser's notes on Cezanne. A piece where the artist's life and ways of obsession are clearly scored. Walser seems to be coming to terms with his own artistry and accomplishments. Is he as proud as what he has done with his mind as Cezanne deserves to be with his hands? This same year he admitted himself into the sanitarium. If nothing else this ended his incessant battle between the desire to participate in life vs. the lack of desire or inability to be part of something he saw as the thin veneer of what was real. Unfortunately four years later declared as officially insane he was shipped off to a psychiatric institution.

Perhaps he said already everything he had to say in that deviously simple, ironic, flutter of words buoyed by whimsy, an understanding of pain, loneliness, and cornered by emotional paralysis that the world can understand. If not he and we missed out on much.

4.5/5

[Hakan · Rating 5 out of 5]

kitap bir derleme, bütünlüklü bir değerlendirmesi yapılabilir mi bilmiyorum. çünkü kitaba adını veren öykü apayrı bir yerde duruyor. bir uç, bir zirve. okuyup bitirdikten sonra yeni bir öyküye geçmedim günlerce. öykünün gücü-etkisi bir tarafa, sonraki öykülerin bu öykünün yanına bile yaklaşamayacağını düşünüyordum. imkansızdı bu. bir süre ara verdikten sonra gezinti’yi tekrar okudum, sonra bir kez daha okumaya karar verdim. bugüne kadar okuduğum en iyi öykülerden biri gezinti, birincisi belki de.

bu birincilik payesinin gerekçesi ne derseniz, şöyle bir şey söyleyebilirim genel olarak: gezinti çocuksu bir saflıkla keskin bir zekanın birlikteliğiyle oluşturulup biçimlendirilmiş. günlük hayatın içinden zamanına, zamanından tüm zamanlara ulaşan bir perspektife sahip. neredeyse her satırında müthiş bir inceliğin, inanılması güç bir duyarlılığın izleri var. mizah ve ironi eksik olmuyor diğer yandan. ölçü korunuyor, denge hep gözetiliyor. tüm bunların varlığının borçlu olduğu yazarlık gücü ve ustalığı var bir de elbette: yaklaşımda, dilde, üslupta...gezinti’yi okuduğunuzda kusursuza yakın bir metin okuduğunuzu düşünüyorsunuz.

genel övgü cümleleri altının doldurulmasına muhtaç tabii. ayrıca yazardan bahsetmek gerek. gezinti’deki kahramanı bir pencere kenarından şarkı söyleyen genç bir kızı duyduğunda “kahırdan ölmeyi andırıyordu bu,” diye yazan bir yazar çünkü robert walser. o yüzden walser okumaya ve okuduklarım hakkında yazabildiğim kadar yazmaya devam edeceğim diyerek bitireyim şimdilik. “kahırdan ölmeyi andırıyordu bu; belki de aşırı hassas bir sevinç, aşırı mutlu bir aşk ve hayat yüzünden ölmeyi ve fazla zengin ve güzel bir hayat hayali yüzünden yaşama becerisinden yoksun kalmayı andırıyordu; öyle ki, şefkat dolu, aşk ve mutluluktan taşan, varoluşu coşkuyla dolduran düşünce sanki bir bakıma kendi üzerine çullanıyor ve kendisinin altında kalıyordu.”

[Ben Winch · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOTE: This is a review of the Serpent’s Tail edition (a collection of stories) NOT the New Directions edition (a single novella). For those interested, a 2013 reprint of the Serpent’s Tail edition is available (ISBN 9781846689581); also the same text has been printed by NYRB Classics as Selected Stories (9780940322981) and, I believe, by Farrar, Straus, Giroux also as Selected Stories ( 9780374259013).

I have read many Walsers since but this was the first, and it contains my favourite story (so far) in all of world literature: “Kleist in Thun”. Just on this basis the book is worth five stars. Does it matter if, at the time I read it, I didn’t really comprehend most of the other (mostly autobiographical, occasionally drole and often very short) pieces in this book? When later I better understood Walser I came to like the long title story, and to enjoy the warm-hearted, lightly mocking humour of the other pieces, many of which were written for publication in the highbrow newspapers and journals of Switzerland and Germany before, during and immediately after the First World War, by a young Swiss “hayseed” who had wanted, upon his arrival in Berlin, to be an actor, and who despite early successes had become increasingly desperate in his search for a modest living. Masquerade & Other Stories may be a better overall introduction, and it’s certainly a beautiful paperback edition (John Hopkins University Press, I think), but it doesn’t have “Kleist in Thun”, and it doesn’t have Susan Sontag’s introduction.

As so often, Sontag is passionate here: “heartbreaking” is the word she uses, and in truth the entire story of Robert Walser is a little heartbreaking. I won’t outline his life here – this has already been done by many, often passionately, notably W.G. Sebald and J.M. Coetzee. Also a kind of cult appears to have developed around certain aspects of Walser’s life, much of it based less upon facts than on their absence. Luckily, I knew nothing of this when I first read “Kleist in Thun” in the winter of 1997 in Tasmania, having just found this book in its rare earlier Serpent’s Tail incarnation in an otherwise un-noteworthy secondhand bookstore in Hobart on one of my weekly expeditions to the city. At the time I was living in a cabin about ten minutes drive into the mountains from New Norfolk, up behind the Wellington Range whose front slopes can be seen from central Hobart. I was alone, writing, possibly the most receptive I would ever be to a story about the breakdown of a writer in the mountains in Switzerland – in surroundings, Walser says, “considerably more beautiful than I have been able to describe here, the lake is twice as blue, the sky three times as beautiful.”

There’s something indescribable that takes hold of you when you read certain of Walser’s sentences. Sometimes (as in The Robber, in his late work) they are jarring, apparently deliberately so, but in this story they lull you, soothe you, coo to you as if to a baby. There’s something childlike – like daubs on a canvas – about the whole way he describes Thun and its surroundings and Kleist’s life there. The picture seems as if backlit, illuminated. It glows. “The Alps have come to life and dip with fabulous gestures their foreheads into the water.” I have read this thing – it’s nine pages long – at least ten times now, more than the Jorge Luis Borges stories I so revered in my twenties, more than Kafka’s “A Country Doctor”, more than Carver, Kavan or Poe. Yet with each re-reading of Walser I hesitate; I want to savour it. And... I’m scared. This is writing that changes you – or changed me, at least. And it lingers. It haunts you.

Walser the person lingers too, as does Samuel Beckett when we read a lot of him, and know something of his life. Often this seems inevitable – for instance when Walser writes, as so often, of his endless walks, of his bedsit rooms, of the trials of his almost-invisible everyday existence. But in the Kleist story it’s something magical. A hall-of-mirrors effect: what we know or can discover of Kleist and what we know or have just read (in Sontag’s introduction) of Walser, and then every archetypal story we have heard of some writer’s breakdown in the mountains, from Georg Buchner’s Lenz (which must surely have influenced this) to King’s and Kubrick’s The Shining (not that Kleist or Walser ever go to work with the axe!) The thing is, Walser knows he is caught in this prison of reflections: “I know the region a little perhaps, because I worked as a clerk in a brewery there.” The story is beautiful and disquieting anyway, but with this added layer of Walser’s self-knowledge and self-reference intruding it is actually – Sontag’s word again – heartbreaking.

To me, it’s this quality above all that defines Walser’s writing – this self-referencing. As with another (in English) neglected modernist, Fernando Pessoa, certain critics have proclaimed Walser not merely a precursor of but an early example of postmodernism. I don’t know about this, but I do consider Walser unique, and if not ahead of his time then certainly outside of it. Still, I suspect this may be a side effect of that virtual invisibility which I mentioned earlier. Famously, Walser is supposed to have approached upper-class Viennese literary hero Hugo von Hofmannsthal at a dinner party with the words, “Couldn’t you just forget you’re famous for a while?” Self-importance – it’s in scant supply in Walser, even when he’s comparing himself to Heinrich von Kleist. Instead, a warm heart. A sense of humour. And – even allowing for hiccups in translation (which become clearer when you compare the work of his two main translators so far, Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton, each with his/her positive and negative traits) – an imaginative approach to style almost without equal among his contemporaries. (Beckett and Kafka – an admirer of Walser – spring to mind as peers.)

In the past fifteen or so years I have encountered Walser with increasing rapidity, as a kind of snowball effect has made possible Bernofsky’s translations of all his major existing works. The Robber and The Assistant are both excellent, but nothing matches this one story. Bear in mind, the language is twice as potent as I have been able to describe here, the imagery three times as beautiful. And I know the region a little perhaps, because I spent some time there.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something about Walser's meandering prose speaks directly to unsettled spirits. This slender volume is a companion to return to whenever life feels too structured, too determined by external forces rather than internal rhythms.

Neither fully fiction nor memoir, neither plot-driven narrative nor pure philosophical musing. Instead, the book exists in that liminal space where literature becomes something closer to lived experience. When Walser writes, "I am nothing but a walker, and I walk not to arrive anywhere, but to walk," I feel a profound recognition. How many of my own best moments have come not from achievement but from the simple act of moving through the world with open senses?

The seemingly trivial encounters in the book—like that wonderful scene in the tailor's shop where buttons become existential symbols—mirror my own experience that profundity often hides in the mundane. I'm reminded of conversations I've had with strangers that unexpectedly transformed my thinking, or small observations that suddenly illuminated something essential about being human.

Walser's descriptions of nature particularly move me. Those trees "standing like silent philosophers" capture something I've felt but never articulated—the sense that the natural world contains wisdom if only we'd slow down enough to receive it. There's something both comforting and unsettling in this vision of nature, a beauty tinged with awareness of its transience.

The Walk gently insists that meaning doesn't require grand narrative or purpose. The walker finds significance in fleeting encounters, in momentary beauty, in the rhythm of his own footsteps. In our hyper-productive, goal-oriented world, there's something revolutionary in Walser's suggestion that sometimes "the act of moving forward is enough."

This book is a way of seeing—a reminder to find wonder in the overlooked corners of daily life, to value digression, to understand that the path matters more than the destination. In Walser's wandering, I recognize my own search for meaning—not in some final revelation, but in the countless small moments that make up a life.

I am so sad when I think about Walser's final years and death. After spending decades in mental institutions following a breakdown in 1929, Robert Walser was found on Christmas Day, 1956, face-down in the snow near the asylum where he lived. He had gone for one of his beloved walks, the very activity that had given him such joy and inspiration throughout his life, only to collapse from a heart attack. There's something hauntingly poetic about his end—the solitary writer who celebrated wandering as a form of freedom dying alone on a winter walk through a snow-covered landscape. The footprints leading to his body traced his final journey, a lonely path that somehow seems both tragic and fitting for a man whose art was so deeply connected to the act of walking.

[Prickle]

Sometimes when I finish a book there’s a feeling in my mind of pure nullity, where I couldn’t say a single thing about the text even if I wanted to. It’s not often however that this feeling extends for weeks or even months. I suspect that some people who read Robert Walser will go the rest of their lives not sparing a single synapse more about him after they finish, let alone a word or a sentence. I myself was going to relegate my opinion (or lack thereof) to this near universal silence (at least maybe until I read Jakob von Gunten), when inexplicably today the rest of this review sprang nearly fully formed into my head at once:

There’s something about his prose pieces that slip right between the cracks of the brain, or lend themselves to the feeling of hanging on the precipice with one hand over the abyss of pure incomprehension, like reading every story is a struggle between your conscious mind and the demon of negation and nonexistence. Whatever ideas can be extracted from his stories I sincerely say our young art of literary criticism has not yet the tools for, merely blind thrusts in the dark. It’s not morals, emotions, or even philosophical crumbs that should be extracted from his stories with this highly specialized yet nonexistent literary scalpel that is not to be used for something as imprecise and brutal like surgery, but for the extraction of an art without beginning or end that exists and dies wholly in a void but is intermittently rescued by select members of posterity who themselves have not the foggiest the nature of what they have rescued or its worth other than its being unique. Even what Walser himself says about his works, that they are like a part of a larger story which is himself, is no more than itself a piece of inventive prose and completely unverifiable. Here the parallel to Kafka is the greatest, where he makes these innocuous comments about his own stories that can throw the futile act of "interpreting" them off the track for years, if however there were any interpreters of Walser like there were of Kafka. Highly recommended for strollers, connoisseurs of the small, and fans of Walter Benjamin, with no guarantees of a single coherent thought after you finish, naturally, but maybe an increased sense of appreciation for the strange and unknown, or the awareness that the literature farthest from our regular sensibilities are by their essence the only ones that can communicate to us thoughts that would not normally occur on our relaxed plane of easy comprehension.

[Sarah Etter · Rating 4 out of 5]

the thing is, i love robert walser. the first six or seven stories in this collection ripped my guts apart. so did the last two. the middle sort of slumped for me, but overall, i'm shocked more people aren't screaming walser's name off of mountain tops.

it's easy to drop kafka's name every five minutes, especially if you're in any sort of MFA program. but walser is the spine.

"response to a request" is one of my favorite stories ever written - whenever i read it, i end up writing something new. i want to compete with that story, that's how beautiful it is and how much it challenges me.

"remember what i told you before; namely – and you’ll know it still, i hope – that it is possible for one eye alone, open or closed, to achieve an effect of terror, beauty, grief, or love, or what have you. it doesn’t take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise god, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave. it is the same, naturally, with anger also."

how do you compete with that paragraph? it is a punching bag of words stuffed with so many ideas that your fists will wear down to the bone before you can beat every meaning out of it.

my other favorites here: so! i've got you, stork and porcupine, trousers (a little bit barthelme), nervous ("mortars have mortared me to bits"), and the honeymoon.

these stories are sharp little shards of smartness, challenging but easy to read, mind-bending but wise. what i want to say is: if walser isn't on your shelf, i don't know if i can be your friend.

[Terri · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Walk,” was my answer, “I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could neither write the half of one more single word, nor produce a poem in verse or prose. Without walking, I would be dead, and would long since been forced to abandon my profession, which I love passionately.” Robert Walser


The tragic and lonely death of Robert Walser and his battles with mental illness have overshadowed his life and his work. It is a shame because this is a writer who deserves much more recognition than he receives. This bittersweet book is about his narrator and his musings as he strolls and does his errands around town. A must read because of his beautiful prose.

[Markus]

"Der Spaziergang" ist ein Manifest für den Müßiggang. Der Protagonist und Erzähler flaniert ohne Ziel durch Stadt, Land und Wald und kommentiert seine Begegnungen und Beobachtungen mit einem manierierten inneren Monolog. Er genießt es, dem lieben Herrgott den Tag zu stehlen - eine Provokation für den Zeitgeist der anbrechenden Moderne und ihrer betriebsamen Aufbruchstimmung.

Seine Stimmung ist den äußeren und inneren Eindrücken hilflos ausgeliefert und ändert sich unversehens von Glückseligkeit zu tiefer Betrübnis und wieder zurück. Vielleicht schon ein Anzeichen seiner schweren psychischen Krankheit?

Stilistisch hatte ich meine Mühe mit der betont umständlichen und elaborierten Ausdrucksweise, die eher nach 1717 als nach 1917 klingt. Die Sprache überhöht so den Text bewusst als künstliches, poetisches Konstrukt und steht im Kontrast zur Banalität mancher Situationen. Der Erzähler distanziert sich damit und stellt sich selbst und seine Erhabenheit in Frage. Vielleicht lässt sich die Sprache auch als passiver Widerstand gegen die Hektik der Zeit verstehen - Walser ist ja gerade erst enttäuscht aus dem gerade wahnsinnig werdenden Berlin zurückgekehrt.

"Der Spaziergang" ist ein bemerkenswertes und wichtiges Dokument eines literarischen Außenseiters. Obwohl ich selbst ein großer Freund von Müßiggangs und Entschleunigung bin, kommt mir Walsers Intention nicht wirklich nahe. Trotzdem interessant und amüsant.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Walser's shortshort stories made me want to do the following things:
take long long walks in the country
rent a room in the home of an aging woman (preferably Ursula Le Guin)
lay down in the woods, the left side of my face upon a patch of moss
pick wildfllowers, slowly
write a letter
go to a mueseum with old art, watch the paintings, see them slowly

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story "The Walk" makes a misleadingly simple impression: an author walks in high spirits through the city streets, reporting what he sees on his way, constantly making comments; but through a number of confrontations with others his cheerful mood changes into melancholy and dejection. The tone at times is lofty, but with an ironic undertone that often changes into sarcasm; especially the feverish monologues and fierce arguments with others made me think very much of Gogol (as W. G. Sebald notes in the added essay on Walser). Thus, not a realistic narrative, but a succession of bizarre reflections and encounters in a sometimes surreal atmosphere.

It is clear that Walser intended to bring 'The Walk' as an allegory, a story of a human life in brief, from birth to death; a poor human life, with emphasis on the weaknesses of the narrator and the shortcomings of his condition (especially in his relationship to others), and also regular references to the tough life of a writer. Simultaneously Walser provides a critical reflection on what civilization seems to be: constantly the pomposity and gaudiness of passing people and of modern life is criticized, even the at first authentic looking aesthetic and ethical experiences of the narrator (with a particularly ecological reflex) are punctured in short sentences. What remains in the end is a very daunting, tragicomic impression of life, not coincidentally the closing words of the story are: "everything was dark." Truly a discovery, this Walser!

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard about Robert Walser in a story about his practice of “microscripting,” a method of writing Walser developed later in his writing career. The practice entailed writing in a very tiny, penciled script on any available paper, including wastepaper. When this writing was discovered, after Walser’s death, there some was some initial confusion about what it even was, for it was not immediately recognizable. Walser wrote pages upon pages of content in this manner. The very idea captured my imagination and I tried to wonder why someone would write that way and what they would write about.

One of Walser’s best known stories, “Walking,” is the showpiece of this collection. and in it I see a methodology of practice that captures what Walser does throughout his stories. His stories are strolls across different actual and topical terrains. Writing, like walking, is an activity that is occasionally purposeful but just as often not. It is slow and deliberate and it allows the time to pay attention, to observe, to see things that may not be seen in any faster mode of transport. Walking also takes you across terrain, crossing properties and landscapes but not necessarily by the paths laid down — one goes where interest leads. The pace and the closeness of the walking allows him the opportunity to meet people, to observe them from afar but also to approach, to see details that might otherwise be missed.

Frequently these observations unfold languorously and contemplatively as the narrator considers how people, but also animals and inanimate things fit into the situations where they are found.

“Little snowdrops, of what do you speak? They speak still of winter, but also already of spring; they speak of the past, but also saucily and merrily of the new. They speak of the cold but also of something warmer; they speak of snow and at the same time of green, of burgeoning growth.” (“Snowdrops”)

The narrator also often acknowledges himself, and his own place in the world is sometimes just beyond, slightly out of synch with the surroundings, creating a sense of intimate loneliness, not always unhappy loneliness but sometimes it is. He is moving and walking and going and coming and as a result is often without a place to be. I’m reminded of Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationiste’s practice of the Dérive — movement without a place to be, outside of relationships and just out of reach from people. In this practice, the narrator writes himself apart from the rest of the world.

“Somewhere on the solid ground now a thief prowls, hunting for swag, there is a burglary, and all these people down there, in their beds, this great sleep slept by millions. An entire earth dreaming now, and a people rests from its labors.” (“Balloon Journey”)

The entire world sleeps except for the narrator who, like in many stories, stands apart from the world, not fitting in but still viewing its inhabitants with a kind of tenderness and affection.

Often and increasingly toward the end of Walser’s career, his stories dwell in a peaceful, resigned melancholy of being overlooked but not unappreciated.

“Have I never given anything to you? Yet it needs no happiness. Perhaps, if someone thinks it is beautiful, it is glad." (“The Little Tree”)

There also creeps in a persistent note of self-consciousness and fatigue:

“I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. […] That’s life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I’m not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen anymore either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up.” (“Nervous”).

The later stories feel a little more introspective and Walser, the writer, comes more to the foreground and not, seemingly, with much comfort. The prose seems less playful and more self-aware and apologetic(?) or self-conscious.

Overall, the stories were quite enjoyable. They are not always about anything at all, but they seem to say so much.

[Jörg · Rating 4 out of 5]

You cannot separate Robert Walser as a person from the protagonists in his novels and stories. This is even more true for the short form as I learned from this collection. Robert Walser is an oddity among writers. While artists usually want to stand out with their art and create something unique, Walser was the opposite from what I could gather from the afterword and from what I read about him before. His writing was an effort to prove that he's normal. It was an effort to participate in life. He's writing about average situations, about average people. But his voice has the power to create something extraordinary out of the mundane. He manages this feat by taking himself/his protagonists out of contention. They are inferior to their environment, they are watchers, the richness is in their impressions of what they experience.

This is perfectly reflected in the main novella of this collection and Walser's most popular story 'The Walk'. On the surface, this is just a stroll of Walser's alter ego. He leaves home before noon, walking through his neighborhood, discovering charming details in the grey common periphery of the city he's living in. Small details lead to musings about writing, one thought leads to the next. All of this is written in stylized, hyper-polite prose with a constant breaching of the fourth wall. A medium-aged woman becomes a retired actress, a young girl is considered a gifted singer. The woods earn a mystic quality. An invitation to lunch is transformed into a challenge worthy of an Odysseus before the truth is resolved. The same is true for daily chores he faces like trying a new suit at the tailor to check the fit. In the end, all is in vain and he returns home to his misfortune.

The other stories are much shorter and stem from his early phases of writing in Berlin beginning of the twentieth century to his final decade of writing in the 20's before he was committed to a mental health clinic for good. They vary in quality, style and accessibility.

I tended to like the earlier stories more. They already feature Walser's sharp dissection of reality while still having a glimpse of hope, a moral, coherence or something to think about. 'Brief eines Mannes an einen Mann' or Schwendimann are good examples.

'Helblings Geschichte' stands out as a recognition of Walser's hopelessness, the feeling that he should be alone in the world, standing on a single rock.

'Tagebuchblatt' is proof that Walser is still relevant today. He ponders about the enormous military expenditures of a country he read about. He questions why this is necessary and ends with the realization that the cause is the human nature.

Reading Walser doesn't cause laughter or feeling good. But readers willing to get in touch with Walser's dark side will be rewarded with profound insights and unique viewpoints of everyday situations.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I overuse 'sublime' when writing about writing. Walser is actually sublime. Calm, playful, wistful, odd, ineffable. Sebald said Walser's lines dissolved off the page, effervessed. Here is a High Modernist of (Swiss) German lit that should be shelved beside Mann, Kafka, Musil, Broch -- Borges and Woolf in their fictionish nonfictions.

[Kimley · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What are you?" the lady asked.
"A poet!" I replied.
She went away without a word.

Spoiler alert....

That lady came to a bad ending.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a remarkable collection. there is a deceptive simplicity to walser that belies his authorial prowess. these stories elicit a lasting effect not unlike strolling amid a snowfall: a sense of enchantment, breathtaking beauty, and dazzling serenity countered by fragility and potential devastation. refined, resplendent, and slightly rueful.

of all these exceptional stories, "kleist in thun," "helbling's story," "the little berliner," and "the walk" shine brightest.

"we don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. we already see so much."

[Jesica Sabrina Canto · Rating 3 out of 5]

La primera mitad me gustó, hasta donde el personaje habla con el recaudador de impuestos, luego me pareció forzado, hay un cambio notorio en cuanto a lo que cuenta y me parece que sobra.
Hay una postura respecto al arte y la inscripción que es, sin dadas, interesante. Al menos, me lo parece a mí como escritora.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites -

Helbling's Story
The Walk
Poets
Titus
The Pimp

[Anima · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘I am a kind of artisan novelist. A writer of novellas I certainly am not. If I am well-disposed, that’s to say, feeling good, I tailor, cobble, weld, plane, knock, hammer, or nail together lines the content of which people understand at once. If you liked, you could call me a writer who goes to work with a lathe. My writing is wallpapering. One or two kindly people venture to think of me as a poet, which indulgence and manners allow me to concede. My prose pieces are, to my mind, nothing more nor less than parts of a long, plotless, realistic story. For me, the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.
ROBERT WALSER, “Eine Art Erzählung,”1928–29

Loved ‘Kleist in Thun’, which beautifully and thoughtfully lets us see the inner world of German writer Heinrich von Kleist through lenses focused on the Swiss town of Thun.

-‘Briefly then Kleist made himself comfortable in the three rooms which, at an astonishingly low price, were assigned to him. “A charming local Bernese girl keeps house for me.” A beautiful poem, a child, a heroic deed; these three things occupy his mind. Moreover, he is somewhat unwell. “Lord knows what is wrong. What is the matter with me? It is so beautiful here.”
He writes, of course. From time to time he takes the coach to Berne, meets literary friends, and reads to them whatever he has written. Naturally they praise him to the skies, yet find his whole person rather peculiar. He writes The Broken Jug. But why all the fuss? Spring has come. Around Thun the fields are thick with flowers, fragrance everywhere, hum of bees, work, sounds fall, one idles about; in the heat of the sun you could go mad. It is as if radiant red stupefying waves rise up in his head whenever he sits at his table and tries to write. He curses his craft. He had intended to become a farmer when he came to Switzerland. Nice idea, that. Easy to think up, in Potsdam. Poets anyway think up such things easily enough. Often he sits at the window.
Possibly about ten o’clock in the morning. He is so much alone. He wishes there was a voice beside him; what sort of voice? A hand; well, and? A body? But what for? Out there lies the lake, veiled and lost in white fragrance, framed by the bewitching unnatural mountains. How it all dazzles and disturbs. The whole countryside down to the water is sheer garden, it seems to seethe and sag in the bluish air with bridges full of flowers and terraces full of fragrance. Birds sing so faintly under all the sun, all the light. They are blissful, and full of sleep. His elbow on the windowsill, Kleist props his head on his hand, stares and stares and wants to forget himself.‘
‘The smells of human bodies filter through their clothes, out of the inns there pour the sounds of carousal, dancing, and eating. All this uproar, all the freedom of the sounds! Sometimes coaches cannot pass. The horses are completely hemmed in by trading and gossiping men. And the sun shines dazzling so exactly upon the objects, faces, cloths, baskets, and goods. Everything is moving and the dazzle of sunlight must of course move nicely along with everything else. Kleist would like to pray. He finds no majestic music so beautiful, no soul so subtle as the music and soul of all this human activity. He would like to sit down on one of the steps which lead into the narrow street. He walks on, past women with skirts lifted high, past girls who carry baskets on their heads, calm, almost noble, like the Italian women carrying jugs he has seen in paintings, past shouting men and drunken men, past policemen, past schoolboys moving with their schoolboy purposes, past shadowy alcoves which smell cool, past ropes, sticks, foodstuffs, imitation jewelry, jaws, noses, hats, horses, veils, blankets, woolen stockings, sausages, balls of butter, and slabs of cheese, out of the tumult to a bridge over the Aare, where he stops, and leans over the rail to look down into the deep blue water flowing wonderfully away. Above him the castle turrets glitter and glow like brownish liquid fire.‘

‘I am not alive, he cries out, and does not know where to turn with his eyes, hands, legs, and breath. A dream. Nothing there. I do not want dreams. In the end he tells himself he lives too much alone. He shudders, compelled to admit how unfeeling is his relation to the world about him.‘

‘Weeks pass, Kleist has destroyed one work, two, three works. He wants the highest mastery, good, good. What’s that? Not sure? Tear it up. Something new, wilder, more beautiful..’
‘..he wants to abandon himself to the entire catastrophe of being a poet’

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Might I confess to finding that it is exquisite to be of two minds regarding works of art? To find fault with something that I welcome on the whole, how nice I find this!

These are quiet, quirky stories. Some are very funny. Some are very modest, not even stories, just sketches, just thoughts captured in a weird head. Most end not with a bang, but with a whimper. But this is a good thing, in the hands of Walser. These stories are meant to be read really slowly, I think, not in the hurry that we are so used to these days. He often rambles and he often walks. He gives voice to very obvious sentiments sometimes, as in "Winter", but in a way that is both charming and earnest; you almost start to feel those long-trite emotions anew:

See how in the middle of winter love is radiant, brightness smiles, warmth shines, tenderness twinkles, and the glow of all that may be hoped for, all kindness, comes toward you.

In a world where everyone takes 3 lefts to get to the right, it's refreshing to see someone just take a right. Sometimes one of his alternate personalities takes over and he is paranoid, or A.D.D., or slightly off as in The Street(1) or Nervous.

My favorites: Kleist in Thun, A Little Ramble, The Pimp

Here is the "A Little Ramble" in its entirety:

A Little Ramble

I walked through the mountains today. The weather was damp, and the entire region was gray. But the road was soft and in places very clean. At first I had my coat on; soon, however, I pulled it off, folded it together, and laid it upon my arm. The walk on the wonderful road gave me more and ever more pleasure; first it went up and then descended again. The mountains were huge, they seemed to go around. The whole mountainous world appeared to me like an enourmous theater. The road snuggled up splendidly to the mountainsides. Then I came down into a deep ravine, a river roared at my feet, a train rushed past me with magnificent white smoke. The road went through the ravine like a smooth white stream, and as I walked on, to me it was as if the narrow valley were bending and winding around itself. Gray clouds lay on the mountains as though that were their resting place. I met a young traveler with a rucksack on his back, who asked if I had seen two other young fellows. No, I said. Had I come here from very far? Yes, I said, and went farther on my way. Not a long time, and I saw and heard the two young wanderers pass by with music. A village was especially beautiful with humble dwellings set thickly under the white cliffs. I encountered a few carts, otherwise nothing, and I had seen some children on the highway. We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

Some links:

Wandering with Robert Walser a Robert Walser obsessed blog, with some good resources for the fanatics.

Three Robert Walser Stories previously unpublished and translated by Damion Searls.

The New Novel another good story not in this collection, up at N + 1 magazine.

The Man with the Beautiful Wife another good story not in this collection.

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bazen dalgacı bazen de yakıcı uslubuyla kendisini ilgiyle okutan bir yazarmış Walser. 1917'de bir otel odasında yazıldığı belirtilen hikayelerin önemli bir bölümü de yazarın, yaratıcının karşı karşıya kaldığı sorunları, sınamaları işliyor. Kitaba adını da veren, novella niteliğindeki ilk hikaye Gezinti müthiş. Ortalardaki hikayeler biraz didaktik, ama sonra tekrar kalite yükseliyor. Toplum içinde yaşamanın sıkıntılara gayet iyi değiniyor, doğaya güzel selam veriyor. Yeterince hakkı verilmemiş bir yazarlardan olduğu kesin. Aşağıdaki iki alıntı bunu teyid etmiyor mu...

Toprağa, havaya, gökyüzüne bakarken gökyüzüyle yeryüzü arasında zavallı bir tutsak olduğum gibilerinden, üzücü, kaçınılmaz bir düşünceye kapıldım; tüm insanların bu biçimde acınılası bir tutsaklık yaşadıklarını, herkesin önünde sadece tek bir karanlık yolun bulunduğunu, bu yolun deliğe, toprağa uzandığını, mezardan geçenin dışında, öteki dünyaya giden bir başka yolun olmadığını düşündüm. "İşte her şey ama her şey, tüm bu zengin hayat, bu sıcak, düşünceli renkler, bu haz, bu hayat sevinci ve isteği, tüm bu insani anlamlar, aile, arkadaş, sevgili, ulvi güzellikte resimlerle dolu bu aydınlık hava, ana ve baba evleri ve sevgili, nazik yollar günün birinde ölecek ve yok olacak; tepedeki güneş, mehtap ve insanların yürekleri ve gözleri" (s.70)

Yaşlanan insan zamanla pek çok şeyini ya da Tanrı aşkına, her şeyini kaybetse, yoksul düşse ve giderek daha da yoksullaşsa, güzel ve iyi bildiği her şey dağılıp parçalansa, acımasız rüzgarlar umutlarını kapıp götürse, kafası ve kalbi git gide soğusa, yaşama sevinci, tıpkı korktuğu gibi yavaş yavaş sönse, tatsız, dondurucu şartlar, kaçınılmaz olarak bir olguya, muhtemelen çok karanlık ve çok üzücü bir halikate dönüşse bile, en azından geçip giden ve kaybedilen güzel zamanların daima yeni, taze, sıcak, genç kalan hatırası yine de kaybolmaz ve yaşlı insanın bu hatırayı büyük bir şevkle ve özenle koruduğunu görmek kimseyi şaşırtmamalıdır, çünkü esasen güzel olan hatıra, neşeli ve güzel saatlerden yana giderek yoksullaşan insana, başka neşeli ve güzel saatler, hatta belki de daha güzellerini bile hazırlar. İnsan, büyüleyici, neşe dolu kendi Kudüsü'nün yıkılmasını ve harabeye dönüşmesini engellemek için neden böyle gayretle çabaladığını bilir; anıların sevgi bahçesini neden böyle bir sadakat ve azimle suladığını, çapaladığını ve koruduğunu ve soğuk, çıplak şimdiki zamanın ortasında neden çiçekler açan canlı geçmişi filizlendirdiğini ve yetiştirdiğini bilir. (s.160)

[arsen hakobian. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Եթե որոշել եք կարդալ հայերեն թարգմանությամբ, ասում եմ, դանդաղ մահ եք ապրելու։
Սա հիմարություն ա, չի կարելի սենց բաներ անել, ախր ո՞նց կարա ամբողջ գիրքը էսպես վատ թարգմանված լինի։ Էնպիսի տպավորություն ա, որ հայկական հոմանիշների գրքերից ինչ փախած բառ կա, բերել "խցկել" են էս գրքի մեջ։ Պահեր կային, որ չէի դիմանում, ուզում էի շպրտել էն կողմ։ իսկ սյուժեն վաբշե֊վաբշե չհասկացա ։(
#միարեքսենցբաներ

[Οδυσσέας Μουζίλης · Rating 5 out of 5]

Πήγε περίπατο :p

https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2021...

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nach der wunderschönen und informativen Rezi von Ilse, gibt es nicht viel mehr über "Der Spaziergang" zu schreiben. Da muss ich nicht noch meinen Senf dazu geben, (könnte ich auch gar nicht, da Ilse so herrlich schreiben kann). Was mich aber gewundert hat, sind die vielen Rezensionen über dieses Buch, in allen möglichen Sprachen, aber kaum eine auf deutsch. Ist doch die Sprache von Robert Walser im original so speziell, ausserordentlich und kurlig.* Vielleicht bilde ich es mir nur ein, aber ich empfand während des Lesens ein Hauch von "Schweizertum" in seiner Sprache. Und dennoch, oder vielleicht deshalb, ist sie so wundersam.

Hier ein Zitat vom Anfang des Buches:

"Wie die unumstürzliche Autorität schritt Herr Meili ernst, feierlich, hoheitsvoll daher. In der Hand
trug er einen unbeugsamen, wissenschaftlichen Spazierstock, der mir Grauen, Ehrfurcht und
Respekt einflösste. ... Der Mund war juristisch zugeklemmt und zugekniffen. Des berühmten
Gelehrten Gangart glich einem ehernen Gesetz. ... Sein Hut glich einem einem unabsetzbaren
Herrscher."

Ein "wissenschaftlicher Spazierstock", ein juristisch zugeklemmter Mund und eine Gangart die einem ehernen Gesetz gleicht. Wie bin ich froh, dass ich dies im Original lesen konnte!

*kurlig = Schweizerdeutsches Wort für "sonderbar"

[Merve Eflatun · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 / 5
Patlayan şeker tadındaydı. Robert Walser'i çok sevdim. Bazı öyküleri Cortazar ile arkadaşlık edebilir. Ya da Cortazar Walser'a arkadaşlık edebilir.
Kişisel favoriler: ''Hiçbir şey'', ''İşte! Şimdi Elimdesin'' ve gülmeden duramadığım ''Fraulein Knuchel''
Kütüphaneden daha önce alan kişilerden birinin favorisi ise yanına koyduğu milyonlarca yıldıza bakılınca ''Dünyanın Sonu'' gibi gözüküyor.