I’m here to be mad
Christopher Benfey: Robert Walser, 10 May 2018
Walks with Robert Walser
by Carl Seelig, translated by Anne Posten.
New Directions, 127 pp., £11.99, May 2017,978 0 8112 2139 9 Show More
by Carl Seelig, translated by Anne Posten.
New Directions, 127 pp., £11.99, May 2017,
Girlfriends, Ghosts and Other Stories
by Robert Walser, translated by Tom Whalen, Nicole Köngeter and Annette Wiesner.
NYRB, 181 pp., £9.99, October 2016,978 1 68137 016 3 Show More
by Robert Walser, translated by Tom Whalen, Nicole Köngeter and Annette Wiesner.
NYRB, 181 pp., £9.99, October 2016,
“... Best known for his short prose sketches, the idiosyncratic Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) liked to call himself a ‘craftsman novelist’, cobbling together ‘a long, plotless, realistic story’. He insisted that his varied sketches – prose poems, portraits of friends and strangers, detailed accounts of walks through the city or countryside, stray bits of literary or art criticism, oddball fantasies – were actually fragments of a single work, which ‘might be described as a variously sliced up or torn apart book of myself ... ”