Archive for July, 2007

Two additions

I have a couple of additions to the site to announce, if you haven’t noticed them yet. First, on the right sidebar, I’ve added a “Walser Essay Hall of Fame,” which includes the five six best essays on Walser available online. Second, I’ve added a new chapter of the Seelig translation, contributed by my partner in this quixotic enterprise, Mr. Smyth, and his industrious friend, who we shall call “Rosi.” (“Rosi Breitbach, most esteemed young lady!”) Speaking of the translation, the calendar on the wall tells me that we better get going if we’re to finish by Christmas. Thanks to Smyth for getting us back in gear.

Sam :: Jul.31.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »

A novel of floating sensibility

Friend Dave brings news of a splendid, 4,000 word essay on Walser in the August 6, 2007, issue of The New Yorker. Many felicities in this one, penned by “Bad Ben” Kunkel; I’ll pick my favorite para:

Walser’s clerks and layabouts are perhaps the nicest, most considerate people you can meet in modernist fiction, but they can also be cuttingly ironic in the way of only the very polite: that “cozy” bridge to sleep under, that “masculine and human” rationality. Susan Bernofsky reproduces this effect and others with impressive fluency and naturalness, and she must also have enjoyed dusting off words like “swillpot” and “thunderation.” It’s only too bad that, for want of such a translation, Virginia Woolf never learned that the desire she expressed in her 1919 essay “Modern Fiction” for a more impressionistic and less narrowly empirical modern novel, a novel of floating sensibility rather than fixed characters, had been, to such a remarkable degree, anticipated a dozen years earlier by a Swiss writer living in Berlin.

Sam :: Jul.30.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Master of bemused self-deprecation

This is chronologically the fourth, but let’s call it the sixth. I’m already losing count. Kirkus reviewedThe Assistant on July 15, 2007. Here’s how it starts:

The mixed pleasures of introspection and tensions between solitude and society are wryly considered in the great, eccentric Swiss author’s previously untranslated 1908 novel. Walser (1878-1956), best known for his autobiographical novel Jakob van Gunten and his virtually unclassifiable semi-fictional short stories, was a master of bemused self-deprecation whose directionless characters echo his own sad personal history of rootlessness and passivity (he spent the last 20 years of his life in an insane asylum).

Not untrue and not unkind, as Larkin would say. The review closes:

One understands why Kafka acknowledged Walser’s influence. He’s one of
the most underrated, and accomplished, of all the great European
modernist writers.

Both true and kind.

(Thanks, Dave.)

Sam :: Jul.26.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

‘Autumn’ pierced my soul

The fifth review to date of The Assistant, in the July 24, 2007, The Village Voice, by Giles Harvey:

Indeed, from one perspective, Walser’s prose is a tepid slurry of solecism, platitude, and tautology force-fed to the reader in large, grim spoonfuls. It is difficult to think of a modern novelist of any worth who would not think twice about perpetrating a sentence like: “It was as if a black wave were devouring his entire being.” Or: “The word ‘autumn’ pierced Joseph’s soul.”

Why, then, is The Assistant not a disaster? However flawed, irksome, and demanding of our patience, why is it so good? For one thing, it is very funny, and a deep and expansive sense of humor can offset just about any literary shortcoming. Attempting to conceal his gradual descent into pauperism from the neighbors (whom he contemptuously refers to as those “bacon and sausage eaters”), Tobler does what any self-respecting, turn-of-the-century German bourgeois would do: He constructs an elaborate “fairy grotto” in his front garden and invites the skeptics over to marvel at this symbol of prosperity. Here, Walser’s starched and finicky prose comes into its own: “At once they proceeded to the fairy grotto, a cave-like, cement-lined, wallpapered thing, oblong in shape like the inside of a stove, and somewhat too low, causing the visitors to strike their heads on more than one occasion.”

And further on: “I would be surprised if 2007 sees the appearance of a stranger, more inexplicably compelling piece of fiction.”

Harvey isn’t the first writer to comment on Walser’s “platitudes.” Other words that have been applied to his style include “gauche,” “vapid,” and “banal.” It strikes me that “The Literary Offenses of Robert Walser,” a la Twain on Cooper, might make for an interesting essay. And yet, Walser’s style is (bear with me here) a little like Abbey Lincoln’s singing. When you first hear Lincoln sing you think, what is this, the Annoying Music Show? Slowly it dawns on you that the only word that truly applies is “sublime.”

Harvey’s comment on Walser’s humor reminds me that one could assemble a collection of Walser prose pieces that work as comic essays. I think “The Job Application,” for example, belongs in any collection of great, early-20th-Century humor.

By the way, the “black wave” is my favorite scene in the book. It’s one of the many places in The Assistant where it occurred to me that the scariest thing about Walser is not his supposed insanity. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Sam :: Jul.25.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

On the Walser Watch

A few Walser sightings over the past couple days:

As mentioned in a recent comments thread (thanks, Dan), a new translation of a Walser story entitled “The New Novel” was published on the website of the journal n+1 on July 16, 2007. Cheers to translator Damion Searls.

A new website focusing on fiction in translation, Three Percent, mentioned the Searls translation and The Assistant in one of its first blog posts. Three Percent is the online presence of the new publishing house, Open Letter, which was recently founded at the University of Rochester. The house, and the website, are run by former Dalkey Archive Associate Director Chad Post. Looks like a fantastic site.

This week’s issue of Time Out New York features another positive review of The Assistant. It’s brief but interesting; reviewer Jonathan Taylor knows Walser well and he captures some of the nuances of the main character that haven’t been highlighted in other reviews.

Sam :: Jul.25.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

Channel Checking

The Assistant has an official publication date of July 27, but in fact the book is already available from some stores and online booksellers. After my experience with Speaking to the Rose – which I never saw in any bookstore, despite nice coverage in Bookforum – I am curious to see how available The Assistant will be.

My two encounters so far:

City Lights (San Francisco), July 11th. Three copies on the shelf, turned cover out, in the European fiction section. I bought two.

Shaman Drum (Ann Arbor), July 19th. No copies in the store. I asked at the desk: no copies on order. I had to bust the place up a little.

Feel free to report your encounters in the comments section below. This is called “channel checking.”

Sam :: Jul.20.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 9 Comments »

Watercolour shades of sentiment

The U.S. publication of Coetzee’s essay collection, Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005, will probably produce a handful of Walser mentions in the press, given that RW is the subject of one of the better essays in the collection. (As happened in the U.K., you may recall.) Sunday’s Los Angeles Times saw the first such mention, from the pen of our man James Marcus:

In any case, the Central Europeans add some extra dash to the author’s sentences. Describing Robert Walser’s brilliance as a miniaturist, he notes how “watercolour shades of sentiment are inspected with the lightest of irony and the prose responds to passing currents of feeling as sensitively as a butterfly’s wing.” Readers of that benighted storyteller will recognize this as not only lovely but exact.

Indeed.

Sam :: Jul.18.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

A living, breathing world

Another good notice for The Assistant, from Benjamin Lytal in yesterday’s New York Sun:

American readers know Robert Walser (1878–1956) is a neglected writer, but how many knew that we in particular were neglecting him? Until now, Walser’s very winning second novel, “The Assistant” (New Directions, 304 pages, $16.95), first published in 1908, has gone untranslated in English.

Equipped with only his shorter works and the wonderful but very eccentric “Jakob von Gunten,” (NYRB, 200 pages, $14), published in 1909, Walser appeared memorable but somewhat crabbed, like a smaller, Swiss Kafka.

But “The Assistant” contains a living, breathing world, with personalities and a long, fully functioning plot. Walser himself seems to be relishing a fresh access of space … [more]

By the way, I found three copies of The Assistant nicely displayed tonight in one of my favorite bookstores, City Lights in San Francisco. Apparently the book is available in advance of its official publication date of July 27th. Powell’s and Amazon have it in stock too.

Sam :: Jul.12.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »