A Gentle and Angry Instrument: Robert Walser’s Short Fiction
A review by Jacob Silverman
Born in Biel, Switzerland, in 1878, the writer Robert Walser lived until the age of seventy-eight, and through his work, letters, and personal associations came into contact with some of the major literary figures of his age, but the story of his life remains fragmentary, peppered with lacunae. Living in near-poverty and dressed in natty but threadbare suits, he cultivated few personal attachments and owned almost nothing. He courted several women and corresponded with others but never married. Like the rest of his siblings, he produced no children. In the last three decades of his life, confined to an asylum, he didn't publish a word, if he even wrote at all. Yet despite this lack -- what could be called an anti-legacy -- Walser left behind a large body of work that uniquely fused the Romantics' exultation in nature and search for the sublime with the early Modernists' sense of play and intertextuality. But while the author was innovative in his work, Walser himself was an ethereal...
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Previously Reviewed by Virginia Quarterly Review
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