Word: walser
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Robert Walser...
...Author Robert Walser wrote: "How horrible it must be to know that one is famous and to feel that one doesn't deserve it at all." This problem was one that Walser (1878-1956) never had to face. Three of his novels were published during his lifetime, and his work won the admiration of such contemporaries as Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse. But the Swiss-born Walser received almost no public recognition or support. He spent the last 27 years of his life in mental institutions, and his writings, all in German, seemed permanently consigned to the limbo...
Selected Stories offers 42 reasons why Walser's works earned obscurity and deserved far better. Chosen and largely translated by Poet Christopher Middleton, these prose pieces written between 1907 and 1929 convey a sensibility that was well ahead of its time. A half-century or so before Beckett, Walser was instructing an actor in how to end a play that would end all plays: "Then the painted-scenery houses collapse, like frightful drunkards, and bury you. Only one of your hands is to be seen, reaching up from the smoking ruins. The hand is still moving a little, then...
...first act, Walser focuses on the foibles of the villagers, but in the second, communal viscissitudes serve only as a debilitating influence on two people struggling to stay afloat. A modern Germanic Everyman, Alois's desire for love and procreation has been perverted by a hyperdermic needle and a heavy dose of ideology. Unable to shift as rapidly as his neighbors and finding his Nazi utterances dated and scorned, Alois slowly drives himself and his wife insane...
...skins of the rabbits he has been ordered to kill, which accidentally act as truce flags. Slaughtering pure-bred animals creates a confusion in his mind between the theory of German racism and the practice of the gas chambers and starts him on the path to mental collapse. Although Walser occasionally lapses into stereotypes (e.g. the officious German scientist) and occasionally the symbolic brew of Germans, Jews, rabbits, love, and conception is gagging, in his attempt to treat more, his flaws are more understandable...