Product Description

Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces.

Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Today Robert Walser is widely regarded as one of the most important and original literary voices of the twentieth century. In "Masquerade" and Other Stories, Susan Bernofsky presents a representative selection of Walser's work, from his first published fiction to the stately prose of the last years before his voice vanished forever behind the asylum walls. Written between 1899 and 1933, these 64 sketches, scenes, stories, and wanderings through landscapes and dreamscapes are characterized by startling, skewed comparisons, warpings of syntax, vagaries of perspective, and a delight in contradiction. Quirky, playful, and sometimes bizarre, Walser's texts were unconventional by the standards of the early twentieth century. They are still innovative in the context of today's fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #859150 in Books
• Published on: 1990-02-01
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

From Library Journal
As William Gass points out in the forward, Walser was a post-modernist dating back to the first quarter of the century. He loved his food, his beer, and his freedom to ramble in both the Swiss and German countryside and in his own prose, as he does in these 64 short pieces. The "stories" border on essay, on musing, on fantasy, on dreamscape, taking on subjects ranging from ladies' gloves to the gory slaughter of a medieval battle to his own storytelling; and if the narrative doesn't always provide story enough, Walser is often pleasurable in his wit, his outsider's vision, and his uplifting and irreverent good nature. His warm gaiety will not be enough for everyone, but as Hermann Hesse observed of Walser, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."-- Peter Bricklebank, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"This newly translated collection draws upon [Walser's] writing in Zurich, Berlin, Bern and elsewhere between 1899 and 1933. Reading the pieces, the artistry of a contemporary Swiss observer, Paul Klee, comes to mind. Walser's persona and vague human sketches and Klee's whimsical and fantastic images seem kin." -- New York Times

Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)

Customer Reviews

Simple innocent and brutally honest
His (very) short stories span the years he spent wandering around in Zurich,Berlin,Biel and Berne (1896-1933) when he was transferred to a mental institution with a much disputed diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Walser's prose is a stroll at the borders of the society, viewing , admiring, mocking it, and finally refusing to be a part of it. His narrations are about ordinary things but are so profound and sweetly tragic that it leaves one almost stunned. He writes small truths which he called the true truths in a very astonishing, bold way. Many a times he ends his stories abruptly leaving one wondering not only about the story but the story teller himself. He is truly a sublime writer. Recommended to those who appreciate beauty in tragedy.

Heartbreaking Dream Shorts
Walser is a magician of interiors that spiral into an incomprehensible, slightly threatening, but tenderly mysterious world. Follow his mind as it walks through his stories. Maintaining his stance of wide-eyed wonder on the margins of a world of sinister adult mediocrity which many of us strive daily to avoid (even as we're sentimentally attracted to it), he is a navigator scribbling out a map useful to all misfits and dreamers.