Posted on February 1, 2010 by Scott Esposito

We’re just 8 days from our Lit&Lunch event with Susan Bernofsky on Robert Walser, so I thought I’d present a roundup on some writing by and on Walser freely available online. The variety of venues you can find Walser in these days–as well as the quality of writing you’ll see–is a real testament to how far he’s come as a popular author in the U.S. So here are the resources:

Benjamin Kunkel in The New Yorker on Robert Walser:

As adolescents, he and Karl had apparently perfected the art of perching in a high window and throwing their hats onto the heads of passersby, and their mischief persisted in adulthood. One evening at a party, they challenged the famous playwright Frank Wedekind to a bout of Hosenlupf (literally, “trouser-hoist”), a Swiss wrestling variant that makes inventive use of an opponent’s waistband. When Wedekind, discomfited, fled to a café, his tormentors pursued him, hailing him with friendly, if cryptic, cries of “Muttonhead!” and causing him to get caught up in a revolving door. On another occasion, in a literary salon, Walser interrupted the high-flown talk by seizing a young Englishwoman’s leg and praising her small feet.

Three Stories by Walser, translated by Damion Searls, in Vice magazine (Note that for Walser “story” is a bit looser than for more authors. His short fictions really defy most ideas of what a story is, and they should be experienced.)

THE ITALIAN NOVELLA

I have strong cause to doubt if readers will like a story like this about two people, two little people, namely a charming nice young woman and an honest good and in his own way at least just as nice young man who enjoyed the most lovely and heartfelt relations of friendship with each other. The tender and passionate love they felt, each for the other, was like the summer sun in terms of heat and like December snow in terms of purity and chastity. Their kind mutual intimacy seemed unshakeable, and their fiery, innocent inclination toward each other grew from day to day like a wonderful plant rich in color and as rich in perfume. Nothing seemed able to disturb this very sweetest of conditions and very most beautiful trust, and everything would have been nice and perfect if only the honest good dear and young man were not deeply familiar with the Italian novella. . . .

Waggish on Walser’s novel The Assistant:

But what’s most striking is how the tone and scenario anticipate that of early Kafka, particularly that of “The Stoker” and the novel it became part of, The Man Who Disappeared (aka Amerika). Walser is often compared spuriously to Kafka, but in The Assistant, and not in any of his other work that I’ve read, I think there’s some merit to the comparison. . . .

JM Coetzee on Walser in The New York Review of Books:

In Kafka one also catches echoes of Walser’s prose, with its lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox. Here is Jakob in reflective mood:

We wear uniforms. Now, the wearing of uniforms simultaneously humiliates and exalts us. We look like unfree people, and that is possibly a disgrace, but we also look nice in our uniforms, and that sets us apart from the deep disgrace of those people who walk around in their very own clothes but in torn and dirty ones. To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am a mystery to myself for the time being.

What is the mystery of Jakob? Walter Benjamin wrote a piece on Walser that is all the more striking for being based on a very incomplete acquaintance with his writings. Walser’s people, suggested Benjamin, are like fairy-tale characters once the tale has come to an end, characters who now have to live in the real world. There is something “laceratingly, inhumanly, and unfailingly superficial” about them, as if, having been rescued from madness (or from a spell), they must tread carefully for fear of falling back into it.

A Robert Walser Scrapbook at A Journey Round My Skull–a great list, with images, of Walser resources, many of which are hard to find

An excerpt from Susan Bernofsky’s translation of The Tanners, which she’ll be reading from at Lit&Lunch