Archive for September, 2009

Dame mit Barsoi

Here’s something you might like.

A few weeks ago, my fellow literary obsessive and author of the wonderful blog Vertigo shared some interesting news. Bob Skinner, who began an English-language translation of Wandering with Robert Walser long before Smyth and I began ours, has shared his translation online. This is the first time that Seelig’s book has ever been available in English in (what seems to be) its entirely. Do check it out. It’s a bit of a revelation for Walser lovers.

Perhaps I’ll direct my own efforts into commentary, annotation, and illustration. For example, I was reading the entry for 28 January 1943, which is notable for a long passage in which Walser discusses his life. (Seelig: “Here he felt quite comfortable, and began to talk about himself, which he rarely did.”)

Anyhow, when I came to this line it rang a bell:

“I’ll tell you plainly: in Berlin I was fond of making the rounds of common bars and tingletangles, around the time when I lived with Karl and Muschi the cat in the loft. That’s where he painted his Czech girlfriend with the borzoi, but not me. I wandered [foulierte mich] the world from the beginning.”

I thought, hey, I’ve seen that painting. And indeed I had. Here it is:

Karl Walser, Dame mit Barsoi

Cool, huh? I had seen it on Artnet. It was auctioned at Christie’s Zurich in 2004.

Sam :: Sep.12.2009 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »

Refusing the burdens of life

The new issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction looks very interesting. It’s guest-edited by Damion Searls (you remember his translations of Walser’s “The New Novel” and “The Great Talent”) and the main theme is “a lost work from Melville’s major period.”

The issue includes a capsule review of The Tanners, courtesy of Gary Lain, who calls the novel “a curious sort of bildungsroman.” After recounting the main characters in the novel, Lain observes:

These relationships are dynamic, however: characters rise and fall from riches as in Smollett, including, ultimately, and most movingly, Klara herself. This is one indicator of modernity: social fluidity as opposed to a vestigial aristocracy; any other markers for modernism in The Tanners are more thematic than formal, as the novel is episodically structured, and its prose, while beautifully rendered (as translated by Susan Bernofsky), poses no real formal challenges. In the final analysis, Simon’s cheerful refusal to acknowledge the pain and suffering inherent in human social life is a refusal to assume the emotional and spiritual burdens of life as officially constituted, framing these burdens as normative rather than intrinsic to human experience. Simon is in his way courageous: the unassuming hero of a remarkable and compelling novel.

Read it all here. (Hat tip once again to Mr. Lull.)

Sam :: Sep.02.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Variously enraptured and achingly sad

Our friend Dave Lull informs us of something we might have guessed — weeks before The Tanners was reviewed in TimeOut New York, a capsule review appeared in the July 1 issue of Booklist. In Booklist, Brendan Driscoll writes:

“Those who search for beauty,” muses Walser’s peripatetic protagonist as he wanders through a working-class neighborhood, having successfully convinced his landlord to forgive his unpaid rent, “must oftentimes feel that the mere search for beauty in this world gets you only so far.” Therein lies the fundamental tension and emotional core of this novel, which follows the interactions of Simon, our protagonist, with his dispersed siblings and reveals a landscape variously enraptured and achingly sad. Unlike his scholarly older brother or his risk-adverse sister, Simon refuses to be anchored to a profession, instead preferring to punctuate his long walks with piecework at the copyist’s office or to rely on the kindness of strangers. Although sharing an affinity for natural beauty with his second brother, a painter, Simon perhaps has the most in common with his hinted-at third brother, “lost” to mental illness. Beneath Walser’s placid, august prose lies a gnawing ambivalence about the relationship between life and art and between industry and Romanticism. Fans of W. G. Sebald will particularly enjoy Walser’s contemplative prose.

By the way, I’m in San Francisco this week and stopped by City Lights Books tonight, where I was pleased to observe a good supply of The Tanners on the shelf, displayed cover-out. First sighting of The Tanners in the wild.

Sam :: Sep.02.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »