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The Walk
Robert Walser
€ 13.99
€ 10.90
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Description for The Walk
Paperback. One of the great works of European short fiction, by turns funny, reflective and profound Series: Serpent's Tail Classics. Num Pages: 224 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 198 x 132 x 14. Weight in Grams: 176.
Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, The Walk reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Under-appreciated even in his own lifetime, Robert Walser has nonetheless been recognised by such writers as W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and J.M. Coetzee. Like Kafka and Sebald, Walser wrote about the solitude and unease of human existence. Honest, wry and idiosyncratic, his stories are snapshots of the lives great artists, poor young men, beautiful women and talking animals alike. Ranging from the realist to the allegorical, the short fiction collected in this volume demonstrates Walser's uncanny ability to capture both life's strangeness and its small joys.
Product Details
Publisher
Serpent's Tail
Number of pages
224
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2013
Series
Serpent's Tail Classics
Condition
New
Number of Pages
208
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781846689581
SKU
V9781846689581
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-99
About Robert Walser
Robert Walser was born in Switzerland in 1878 and worked as a bank clerk before becoming a writer. In 1929 he started hearing voices, was diagnosed as schizophrenic and - like his contemporary Ezra Pound - lived the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital, where he continued to write. His novels include Jakob von Gunten (published by Serpent's Tail as Institute Benjamenta - 9781852425050) and The Assistant. He died in 1956.
Reviews for The Walk
A clairvoyant of the small...Walser has been my constant companion
W. G. Sebald If he had hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place
Hermann Hesse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature "Kleist in Thun" and "Helbling's Story" show him at his dazzling best
J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer
Susan Sontag An essential writer of our time
Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The future will see Walser as a true literary representative of our age
Max Brod A major twentieth-century prose artist...he sounds like nobody else
Benjamin Kunkel
New Yorker
A writer of considerable wit, talent and originality
New York Times
His perception extended past sensory limits. He elevated the significance of the everyday
Bookslut
One of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century
Juan José Saer Walser was one of those individuals who stand at a slight angle to the world: first impressions suggest words like quirky, or surreal. But, if anything, his art was a beautifully sane challenge to the systematic assault on the subjective and quotidian that was already grinding away when he entered the madhouse. In an age that found it possible to diagnose the inner life as a sticky mass of tics and neuroses, Walser became a polite but stubborn champion of an everyday life in which psyche may play a central role, but pathology is not necessarily a given.
John Burnside The stories of a man in love with the world, but unable to take part in it
Economist Intelligent Life
A kind of grown-up fairy tale. His style is both direct and colloquial yet also poetic in its simplicity.
Lesley McDowell
Sunday Herald
Walser is an original. The book's centrepiece, "Kleist in Thun" is at once a deft literary portrait, a vivid piece of nature writing, and an autobiographical insight into Robert Walser's own mental fragility. All in all, it is as beautiful and moving a story as I have ever read.
Independent on Sunday
Walser left a curiously brilliant and utterly original corpus of work, whose wry surrealism is reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and indeed John Lennon ... a masterpiece
Alfred Hickling
Guardian
W. G. Sebald If he had hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place
Hermann Hesse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature "Kleist in Thun" and "Helbling's Story" show him at his dazzling best
J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer
Susan Sontag An essential writer of our time
Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The future will see Walser as a true literary representative of our age
Max Brod A major twentieth-century prose artist...he sounds like nobody else
Benjamin Kunkel
New Yorker
A writer of considerable wit, talent and originality
New York Times
His perception extended past sensory limits. He elevated the significance of the everyday
Bookslut
One of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century
Juan José Saer Walser was one of those individuals who stand at a slight angle to the world: first impressions suggest words like quirky, or surreal. But, if anything, his art was a beautifully sane challenge to the systematic assault on the subjective and quotidian that was already grinding away when he entered the madhouse. In an age that found it possible to diagnose the inner life as a sticky mass of tics and neuroses, Walser became a polite but stubborn champion of an everyday life in which psyche may play a central role, but pathology is not necessarily a given.
John Burnside The stories of a man in love with the world, but unable to take part in it
Economist Intelligent Life
A kind of grown-up fairy tale. His style is both direct and colloquial yet also poetic in its simplicity.
Lesley McDowell
Sunday Herald
Walser is an original. The book's centrepiece, "Kleist in Thun" is at once a deft literary portrait, a vivid piece of nature writing, and an autobiographical insight into Robert Walser's own mental fragility. All in all, it is as beautiful and moving a story as I have ever read.
Independent on Sunday
Walser left a curiously brilliant and utterly original corpus of work, whose wry surrealism is reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and indeed John Lennon ... a masterpiece
Alfred Hickling
Guardian