A Robert Walser biography

Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. viii + 378 pages. $35.

Translator and, now, biographer Susan Bernofsky’s Clairvoyant of the Small is a brilliant account of Robert Walser’s life, deeply researched, and deeply respectful of its subject, recording Walser’s idiosyncrasies and strangenesses while never reducing him to a condition or attempting a diagnosis in retrospect. The writing is full of inventive turns of phrase along the way, as when Bernofsky describes the inveterate walker Walser’s frequent shifts of residence (she counts sixty-six known addresses between 1878 and 1929) as “a slow-motion real-estate version of walking.” Here is the gist of Walser’s work in one beautiful sentence: “The marginality he celebrates is that of secretly magnificent complexities hiding in plain sight all around us under the guise of the ordinary and small.” A clairvoyant of the small indeed.

For anyone curious about reading Walser in English, I recommend The Walk, from New Directions (Susan Bernofsky’s revision of Christopher Middleton’s translation).

Related reading
All OCA Walser posts (Pinboard)

[The phrase “clairvoyant of the small” comes from Jo Catling’s English translation of W.G. Sebald’s essay about Walser, “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” in A Place in the Country (New York: Modern Library, 2013). Catling gives Sebald’s German: “ein Hellseher im Kleinen,” which borrows from Walser’s “dafür ist es ihm vergönnt gewesen, in seiner kleinen hell zu sehen,” which Catling translates as “he has been granted the gift of farsightedness in his own small world.” Catling notes that “‘Hellsehen’ (‘seeing clearly’) has in German the additional meaning of clairvoyance.”]