Robert Walser

thumb|Robert Walser Robert Walser (1878 – 1956), was a Swiss German-language author noted for several novels and a large number of feuilletons, short stories, and prose pieces that mix fiction and essay with memoir-like musings. Quotes Ruins are rather touching. Before the residues of noble things our pensive, sensitive inward selves involuntarily bow. The remnants of what was once distinguished, refined, and brilliant, infuse us with compassion, but simultaneously also with respect. Bygone days and old decrepitude, how enchanting you are! "Frau Wilke" (1918), Poetenlebun, later translated into English and collected in The Walk and Other Stories (1957) and Selected Stories (1982) I don't want a future; I want a present. That seems more valuable to me. A character in The Tanners (1907), translated by Susan Bernofsky in 2009. Hey, writer! Jesus! What's wrong with you? Are you insane?What's wrong with me? Nothing at all, nothing at all. Please! And I am not in the least insane. I beg a thousand pardons but may I dare maintain that I am completely fine. I am totally normal and reliable in every respect [...] "All Right Then" (1917), collected in w:A Schoolboy's Diary (2013), translated by Damion Searls. I am thrilled to be writing a report on such a delicate subject as trousers [...] "Trousers" (1911), collected in Selected Stories Berlin Stories (2012 collection) When the car arrives, you climb aboard, possibly after first politely ceding the right of way to an imposing gentlewoman, and then the car continues on. At once you notice you have a rather musical disposition. The most delicate melodies are parading through your head. "In the Electric Tram" (1908), collected in Berlin Stories The idler is better off: he need not run and need not fear that the express train will pull out right under his nose. "I was just about to get on when, so help me God, that black devil of a train took off right past my hat." This is the sort of thing uttered by travelers with boarding intentions, but not by the person whose aim it is to blithely, quietly observe. "Something About the Railway" (1907), collected in Berlin Stories I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. [...] "You are nervous," someone might tell me, and I would reply cold-bloodedly, "My dear sir, I know that quite well, I know that I am a little worn out and nervous." And I would smile, very nobly and coolly, while saying this, which would perhaps annoy the other person a little. "Nervous" (1916), collected in Berlin Stories The Walk (1917 and 1920) The story was significantly revised between two editions. Translated by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. Uninterrupted writing fatiques, like digging. "The Walk" (1917, novella), originally Der Spaziergang, later collected in The Walk and Other Stories (1957), Selected Stories (1982), and The Walk (2012), translated by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. I hope no estrangement will ensue if I say that I am writing all these I trust pretty sentences, letters, and lines with a quill from the Imperial High Court of Justice. Hence my brevity, pregnancy, and acumen, possibly at certain points well enough perceptible, at which nobody need wonder anymore. The Walk (1917) At any time the predilection for flowers can deteriorate into a decided foolish mania. The Walk (1917) Quotes about Robert Walser If he had one hundred thousand readers, the world would be better. Herman Hesse in a review of Poetenlebenin Neue Zurcher Zeitung Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser Bernofsky Susan Susan Bernofsky 2021 Yale University Press 9780300220643 Biography https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300268041/clairvoyant-of-the-small/ Also collected in Uber Robert Walser A Paul Klee in prose--as delicate, as sly, as haunted. [...] Walser's [work is] charged with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of life, of the fellowship of sadness. [...] Walser's virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is truly a wonderful, heartbreaking writer. Susan Sontag foreword of Selected Stories Robert Walser Selected Stories Christopher Middleton Foreword Susan Sontag Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012 978-0-374-25901-3 en Walser accrues insights into his [...] state of mind and the nature of mental disturbance [in a way that is] found nowhere else in literature. With seismographic precision he registers the slightest tremors at the edges of his consciousness, records rejections and ripples in his thoughts and emotions. W.G. Sebald Sebald W. G. Catling Jo A Place in the Country Le Promeneur Solitaire: A Remembrance of Robert Walser 2014 New Directions 978-1-40006-771-8 Kafka’s first book, Observations (Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, Leipzig, 1913), seems like a special case of the Walser type Robert Musil in a review, treating both Walser and Kafka together, in the column "Literary Chronicle" for the Neue Rundschau. Walser is a wild particle [who people read for] his blithe difference from colleagues in any age or any condition – for his perfect and serene oddity. Christopher Middleton quoted by Michael Hofmann at Hofmann at the London Review of Books 2006-11-16 Hoffman Michael Michael Hofmann · Perfect and Serene Oddity: The Strangeness of Robert Walser Review London Review of Books https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n22/michael-hofmann/perfect-and-serene-oddity Whether he is observing an Abyssinian lion in the zoo, or complaining about pompous, self-important people, or thinking about a park, or observing a play, or assessing the character of the city street, it is always the quality of mind that holds us rapt. Mary Hawthorne at The New Yorker Mary Hawthorne The New Yorker 2012-03-28 Robert Walser on Everything and Nothing https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/robert-walser-on-everything-and-nothing [A] mixture of passionate identification and subversive mockery at its most unsettling. He can change tones more swiftly and unexpectedly than any German writer I know. [...] [Walser's] quirky power as a storyteller, the elusive interplay between the hopelessly [...] abjectly naive and the sardonically disenchanted, is utterly singular to him. Michael Andre Bernstein at The New Republic Michael Andre Bernstein The New Republic The Man Without Categories 2008-06-11 https://newrepublic.com/article/64328/the-man-without-categories [Walser's work] ironizes pretense, ironizes sincerity, yet leaves the reader with something sincere, unpretentious, and unironic. Mariya Popova at The Marginalian Popova Maria Robert Walser, the Art of Walking, and Our Daily Dance of Posturing and Sincerity The Marginalian https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/02/11/the-walk-robert-walser/ Nature, in Walser’s hands, is a powerfully swirling, anthropomorphic thing. [Walser is] forever teasing out and dramatizing in ungainly and absurd monologues, the difficult, inexorable intersections between selfishness and society, productivity and pleasure, hard work and happiness, idleness and invention. Will Heyward at Music and Literature Heyward Will Robert Walser's A Schoolboy's Diary 2014-01-28 Music and Literature https://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2014/1/28/a-schoolboys-diary There is no one like Walser. Utterly original, he expressed thoughts that no other writer would, except when in the blackest of moods – but Walser expressed them in an extraordinarily sunny way. Nicholas Lezard at The Guardian The Guardian Lezard Nicholas 2013-09-10 A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories by Robert Walser – review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/10/schoolboy-diary-robert-walser-review To read Walser is to fall under the enchantment of a particularly open and youthful enthusiasm. Nora Rawn at KGB Bar Lit A SCHOOLBOY'S DIARY by Robert Walser Rawn Nora 2013-12-02 KGB Bar Lit https://kgbbarlit.com/lit/journal/a_schoolboys_diary_by_robert_walser_translated_by_damion_searls Quotes about The Robber The apparent story in Walser’s work is [...] lost in a barrage of [...] narratorial reflection or abandoned [in] thematic promiscuity. [...] The Robber is one of the most outrageously eccentric and utterly aberrant artifacts of modernism, a cultural phenomenon already famous for its celebration of [...] the unconventional. [...] It skirts the boundaries of its own form, [...] almost succumbing to its own digressive mania. The Robber is a work of nearly unrelenting asides, a novel that sacrifices story in its onslaught of hesitations, prolepses, deliberations, non sequiturs, meta-commentary, retractions, contradictions, exhausting inattentiveness, apologies and a seemingly limitless supply of other dilatory tactics. Scholar S. Frederick on The Robber, within a larger study on digressions in European literature Frederick S. 2011 Stealing the Story: Robert Walser’s Robber-Novel Grohmann, A., Wells, C. Digressions in European Literature Palgrave Macmillan, London https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292529_11 External links Category:1878 births Category:1956 deaths Category:Modernism Category:Playwrights from Switzerland Category:Novelists from Switzerland Category:Short story writers from Switzerland