Selected Stories

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ROBERT WALSER is one of the important German-language writers of this century — a major writer, both for his four novels that have survived (my favorite is the third, written in 1908, Jakob von Gunten) and for his short prose, where the musicality and free fall of his writing are less impeded by plot. This selection of Walser’s short prose was made (and mostly translated) by the admirable Christopher Middleton, who has labored for years to make Walser known to English-language readers, and draws from work done between 1907 and 1929.

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. (At the time, it was more likely to be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, when he first read Kafka pronounced the latter “a peculiar case of the Walser type.”) I get a similar rush of pleasure from Walser’s single-voiced short prose as I do from Leopardi’s dialogues and playlets, that great writer’s triumphant short prose form. And the variety of mental weather in Walser’s stories and sketches, their elegance and their unpredictable lengths remind me of the free, first-person forms that abound in classical Japanese literature: pillow book, poetic diary, “essays in idleness.” But any true lover of Walser will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.

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