More Robert Walser

Robert Walser. Little Snow Landscape. Translated from the German by Tom Whalen. New York: New York Review Books, 2021. 188 pages. $21.95.

Yet again fresh proof of my sedulity in the practice of literature seems to have come off as quite strange.

Robert Walser

Little Snow Landscape collects sixty-nine short prose pieces written between 1905 and 1933. That’s all anyone who already knows Robert Walser’s writing in translation needs to know about this book: more Walser. He appears here, again and again, as a solitary walker, observer, and thinker, sometimes traveling extraordinary distances on foot (Bern to Geneva, Munich to Würzburg). Streets, forests, and snow-covered fields beckon. Skies and landscapes are a stylized array of lovely colors: blue, white, yellow, green. Houses have faces (windows are eyes), and snow-covered roofs are hats. They’re all better seen on foot, because

the walker can take in everything so calmly, sumptuously, and freely, while nowhere can a train traveler stand still and pause, except in the station, where mostly elegant tail-coated waiters inquire whether one would like a glass of beer. (“Walking”)

I love that sniffy “mostly elegant.”

Perhaps even better than traveling on foot is traveling by map, as Walser does in “Illusion,” in which a trip to Moscow includes a visit to a house of pleasure where a woman commands him to pour her a glass of wine. He does, she calls him a nice man, but then — everything vanishes.

Loss is ever-present in Walser’s depiction of human relations. The only love is courtly: self-abased lovers, imperious beloveds, hopeless efforts, rank disdain. Walser’s account of his pursuit of one Louise goes off in different directions, sentence by sentence, before recounting Louise’s exploitation at the hands of a powerful businessman. Or things might go the other way round: “I love you and invite you to dominate me,” a movie man anticipates saying to “a female bit player.”

The most enduring relationships in Walser’s prose are with the things of the world, the more insignificant the better:

Things near seemed to him more significant than significant and important distant things. Thus to him insignificance was significance. (“Walking”)

In “Chamber Piece” a writer at a loss for a subject looks under his bed, and finds nothing. But then he notices an umbrella hanging on the wall: “The thing was quite near.” And so it becomes his subject.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

[Cover: Karl Walser, View from the Window, 1899.]