The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Selected Stories, by Robert Walser, translated by Christopher Middleton, et al.
reviewed by Brooke Horvath

Untitled document

Robert Walser. Selected Stories. Trans. Christopher Middleton, et al. New York Review of Books, 2002. 196 pp. Paper: $12.95.

Robert Walser’s short prose fills fourteen volumes, ten of which he published before permanently entering the sanatorium in which he spent the final twenty-three years of his life (later telling a friend that he was there not “to write, but to be mad”). Selected Stories, which reprints the 1982 Farrar, Straus & Giroux collection (same title, same translations, same preface, same everything), contains forty-two pieces written between 1907 and 1929—just a few years before the author’s 1933 retreat from the world. Prior to his career in mental illness, Walser had been a prolific feuilletonist and contributor to magazines, a butler, an eccentric among the artistes of Berlin, and the often penniless former employee of one employer or another. d by Franz Kafka, Christian Morgenstern, and Hermann Hesse, Walser’s work has been described by his translator Christopher Middleton as “sketches, soliloquies, improvisations, arabesques, and capriccios,” as “miniature impressions, gossipings, entertainments, anecdotes, parables.” Walser himself saw his prose pieces as fragments of a never-ending novel, “a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book about myself.” However classified, these pieces have been sliced from one interesting melon, a mind unlike anyone else’s; one, in Middleton’s words again, of “perfect and serene oddity.” Whether Walser is conjuring the precocious daughter of a Berlin art dealer or imagining the German writer Heinrich von Kleist on vacation, knocking off a mock job application or meditating on women’s trousers, soaring in a balloon above the things that torment him or taking “a little ramble” through the splendidly ordinary mountains, the narrator is likely to sound “a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden” (“Nervous”). He invariably seems a “small, pale, timid, weak, elegant, silly little fellow” who, when doing his little dance of words, nevertheless manages to forget that he is “nothing but a happy floating-in-the-air” (“Helbling’s Story”).


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Selected Stories, by Robert Walser, translated by Christopher Middleton, et al. reviewed by Brooke Horvath Untitled document Robert Walser. Selected Stories. Trans. Christopher Middleton, et al. New York Review of Books, 2002. 196 pp. Paper: $12.95. Robert Walser’s short prose fills fourteen volumes, ten of which he published before permanently entering the sanatorium in which he spent the final twenty-three years of his life (later telling a friend that he was there not “to write, but to be mad”). Selected Stories, which reprints the 1982 Farrar, Straus & Giroux collection (same title, same translations, same preface, same everything), contains forty-two pieces written between 1907 and 1929—just a few years before the author’s 1933 retreat from the world. Prior to his career in mental illness, Walser had been a prolific feuilletonist and contributor to magazines, a butler, an eccentric among the artistes of Berlin, and the often penniless former employee of one employer or another. d by Franz Kafka, Christian Morgenstern, and Hermann Hesse, Walser’s work has been described by his translator Christopher Middleton as “sketches, soliloquies, improvisations, arabesques, and capriccios,” as “miniature impressions, gossipings, entertainments, anecdotes, parables.” Walser himself saw his prose pieces as fragments of a never-ending novel, “a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book about myself.” However classified, these pieces have been sliced from one interesting melon, a mind unlike anyone else’s; one, in Middleton’s words again, of “perfect and serene oddity.” Whether Walser is conjuring the precocious daughter of a Berlin art dealer or imagining the German writer Heinrich von Kleist on vacation, knocking off a mock job application or meditating on women’s trousers, soaring in a balloon above the things that torment him or taking “a little ramble” through the splendidly ordinary mountains, the narrator is likely to sound “a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden” (“Nervous”). He invariably seems a “small, pale, timid, weak, elegant, silly little fellow” who, when doing his little dance of words, nevertheless manages to forget that he is “nothing but a happy floating-in-the-air” (“Helbling’s Story”).

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