20th century (126) Berlin (27) essays (34) European Literature (34) fiction (494) genre - short story (47) German (179) German fiction (33) German literature (327) Germany (47) literature (179) modernism (54) New Directions (43) novel (122) Novela (31) NYRB (131) NYRB Classics (72) poetry (50) prose (39) read (31) Robert Walser (97) Roman (52) short stories (259) stories (46) Swiss (98) Swiss literature (219) Switzerland (234) to-read (516) translation (59) Walser (39)

Common Knowledge

Birthdate: 1878-04-15
Date of death: 1956-12-25
Gender: male
Occupations: writer
Relationships: Walser, Karl (broer)
Nationality: Switzerland
Birthplace: Biel, Bern, Switzerland
Places of residence: Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Place of death: Herisau, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Switzerland
Map Location: Switzerland

Members

Discussions

Jakob von Gunten in Book talk (June 2012)

Reviews

Featured Recent Thumbs

All Ratings
53
½1
52
½11
23
½3
2
2
½1
No Rating

All Languages
English149
Dutch11
French7
Catalan4
Spanish4
Italian3
German2
English (UK)1

181 reviews

siriaeve 2,433 reviews

A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories (New York Review Books Classics) by Robert Walser

A collection of short stories and prose sketches by early 20th-century writer Robert Walser, A Schoolboy's Diary is uneven, idiosyncratic, and often strangely charming. These pieces—sometimes only a page long—show Walser returning over and over to issues of authority, obedience, childhood, and the beauty of the Swiss landscape. Inevitably, some of these are much stronger than others. But when Walser was on, he was on: whether with verbal watercolours of various places, sometimes show more whimsical and sometimes eerie; or with his channelling of the eponymous schoolboy with a narrative voice that's doing something more complex and subversive than it appears at first glance. show less

Jan 8, 20244 other reviews

thorold 2,644 reviews

Der Spaziergang, Prosastücke und Kleine Prosa by Robert Walser

Frustrated at his inability to find a way to follow up the modest success of his three novels, Walser left Berlin in March 1913 and returned to Switzerland, to settle in Biel for the next few years. He continued to publish pieces in newspapers and magazines, and he even won a literary prize for the last of his collections published in Germany, Kleine Dichtungen (the money was trapped in a German bank account and wiped out by inflation before he was able to touch it), but the outbreak of war show more interrupted his relations with his German publishers. In 1916 he was approached independently by three different Swiss publishers looking to include him in their catalogue of home-grown authors, which resulted in the publication within a short space of time of the novella-length Der Spaziergang, and two collections of short pieces, the pamphlet Prosastücke and the book-length Kleine Prosa. These three are brought together in Vol.5 of the Suhrkamp complete works, but you might find other combinations in translations.

Der Spaziergang sets the tone for all the pieces in the book - superficially a very simple account of a stroll the narrator takes on a sunny day in the Swiss town where he lives. He comments on shops and people he passes, reflects on the weather and the scenery, talks about a couple of encounters that sound significant but don't seem to lead to anything, and describes a lunch he's been invited to and a few small errands he has reserved for the afternoon (posting a letter, a fitting with the tailor, an appointment at the town hall). It's all set up in a very modest, self-deprecating and ironic tone, but we soon realise that there's something else going on under the surface. The prose defies the apparently realistic context by looping away in grand, rhythmic structures that often take the reader's breath away. The conversations the narrator describes clearly aren't meant to be taken as realistic accounts of what he has said (or what anyone could get away with saying in real life), but rather what he wishes he could have said, or what he was thinking when he said whatever he did actually say. This creates an uneasy sense of disconnection, alienation, from the banal, ordinary events of life. Images and chance remarks keep reminding us that there's a horrific war going on just offstage. Although all the explicit references are to German Romanticism of the Brentano era, this is unmistakably the voice of modernism - you can't help reading Walser's strolling writer posting his letters, eating his lunch and worrying about his tailor as a contemporary (or precursor) of Bloom wandering through Dublin, Mrs Dalloway buying her flowers or Prufrock walking on the beach.

In the two collections of prose pieces - most of which slide between categories like essay, sketch, story, memoir and review in undefinable ways - there's a similar sense of disconnection between the writer and the world, and a slightly amused astonishment at how strange everything is. We read pieces that are about nothing but themselves and the language they are made of, pieces about great writers (Dickens is chastised for being so good at what he did that he discourages all others from even trying to write), about a sausage, about odd characters who reject social norms, about fairy-tale-like incidents, and very frequently about young writers with various different names (in one case three different names in the same story) who work in offices or factories, become domestic servants, or live in isolation and penury in the suburbs and try to write - all things that Walser had done at various points in his career. Fascinating and delightful! show less

Oct 14, 2018

proustitute 259 reviews

The Walk (New Directions Pearls) by Robert Walser

... the inward self is the only self which really exists.

Walser's The Walk is anything but a light, jolly stroll: it's a trek uphill through spiraling landscapes, before the reader realizes that Walser has begun an abrupt, downward descent. The closing pages of The Walk are utterly heart-rending.

This is a novella about everything and nothing. The narrator, a writer, leaves his "writing room, or room of phantoms" to take a walk through the town and the countryside. Along the way, he meets show more many different people from various walks of life: a postal worker; a tailor; a bookseller; a young woman singing; dogs; children; "the giant" Tomzack; a woman with whom he dines; and several others. It's no wonder that W. G. Sebald has called Walser "a clairvoyant of the small" as each of these interactions—and the bizarre, often archaic, speech acts we witness (e.g., after seeing a sign for lodgings, the narrator goes on for three pages to give the reader the sign's strange subtext)—tells us more about both the narrator's psychological state of mind as well as the world in which he feels so displaced.

In many ways, The Walk can be read as a parable of a changing world where natural scenes are giving way to increasingly industrialized ones; it can also be read as a commentary on how insular a writer's world is, and how the sense of sequestration and loneliness carry over into social interactions and also inform prejudices rooted in aesthetic judgments rather than firsthand observations. One can see how Walser's prose is indebted to pastoral influence of the nineteenth century while also forging new ground stylistically in his modernist musings, causing a strange chorus of dissonant tones to run throughout The Walk—a dissonance that works quite well here, if the reader is patient, knowing he or she is in masterful hands. As Walser's narrator/alter ego exlaims here: "I am a solid technician!" And so he is. show less

Apr 2, 20236 other reviews

lelandleslie 519 reviews

The Walk (New Directions Pearls) by Robert Walser

Ridiculous; sublime; verbose. Whitmanian, with added melancholia.

Spontaneously I exclaimed, "Pretty indignant, by God, should one be, when brought face to face with such golden inscriptional barbarities, which impress upon our rustic surrounds the seal of greed, moneygrubbing, and a miserable coarsening of the soul. Does a master baker really require to appear so huge, with his foolish proclamations, to beam forth and glitter, like a dressy, dubious lady? Let him bake and knead his bread in

honest, reasonable modesty. What sort of vertiginous conditions are we beginning to live in, when the municipality, the neighbors, officials, and public opinion not only tolerate but unhappily, it is clear, even applaud that which injures every sense of good office, every sense of beauty and probity, that which is morbidly puffed up, thinks it must offer a ridiculous, miserable, tawdry show of itself screaming out over a hundred yards' distance into the good air: 'Such and such am I. I have so and so much money, and I dare to make an unpleasant impression. Of course I am a bumpkin, a blockhead with my hideous ostentation, a taste-deficient fellow. But there will scarcely be anyone to forbid me to be blockheaded.'

He was offended, dear reader, by the presence of gold lettering in a bakery's shop window.

The earth became a dream; I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world. Everything outside me faded to obscurity, and all I had understood till now was unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also.

Is not all music, even the most niggardly, beautiful to the person who loves the very being and existence of music? Is not almost any human being you please - even the worst and most unpleasant - lovable to the person who is a friend to man?

show less

Feb 24, 20246 other reviews

See More Reviews