Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I, for one, would rather be a dyed-in-the-wool boor than a bellyacher.", August 27, 2007
Woo! Robert Walser dishes out words like "lummox" and "dumb cluck" with a mastery that no other human author has ever approached. I promise. His shifts of tone have to be read to be believed. His work is more lively and present than any author I've ever encountered.
The plot of the story concerns a rascal-like fellow and his romantic interests. If you read for plot, that should be all you need to know.
The virtues of this book are too diverse to sum up, but here goes.
The Robber isn't a strictly straight-forward narrative, but there is a story arc that runs through it and which has a natural climax and conclusion. My favorite passage for example is a long stretch of text where the narrator speaks to the reader in second person ("you") and describes how to win over a lady performer who just impressed you in a music hall. I wish the book was printed with an index, because you can plant your blind finger down on any page and find Walser hilariously discussing some topic or other like that. (Other examples: modern education, platitudes, motorists, and different aspects of public behavior.) That might sound out of line, but it's never inappropriate because it's always spurred on by the main character's mentality and surroundings.
Walser possesses an extremely perceptive and imaginative understanding of social relations, and of conflicts of personality, which I might say is the main theme of the book. He's also acutely aware of his own shortcomings and anxieties, so that gets thrown into the mix too. Lastly, he brings a moving perspective to the most down-to-earth occurrences. These talents give life to all his other books too, for the record.
Walser writes with all kinds of interjections, and all kinds of short essay-like passages where he addresses some thesis, and all kinds of self-effacing double-takes where he humbles himself. But all of the digressions work perfectly, and cohere into a whole, the flow (in English translation for me, anyway) is spotless and fluid. Everything he says is perfectly inimitable, and precisely Walserian, yet unpredictable. He's the Thelonious Monk of literature.
This book is a tour de force. What else can I call it? Walser wrote Jakob Von Gunten which is pretty straight-forward, a few other novels that were either lost or destroyed, two novels that are finally being translated into English ("The Assistant" was released in July 2007, and "Geschwister Tanner" is in the works), and a huge amount of short prose pieces published in various places or not at all. The Robber is later and more developed than Jakob Von Gunten, and has the length of a novel which gives it a richness and scope that the short pieces can't manage (though Walser makes impressive achievements even in single-page stories). It's kind of nightmarish to consider that he wrote the few hundred pages of this book in micro-microscript on a few pieces of scrap paper that some fool could have accidentally rolled up and smoked.
This book blew apart my understanding of what literature can be and can achieve. And who an author can be, and who a person can be. Still, you should start with JAKOB VON GUNTEN because it's the best starting place-- don't be a bellyacher.
I also have to give applause to the translator Susan Bernofsky, because every passage of this book is impeccable and unique, which I assume means the translation is superb.
I'm going to provide an excerpt here.
"In wine lies something like a right to superiority. When I drink wine, I understand previous centuries; they too, I tell myself, consisted of things contemporaneous and the desire to find one's place among them. Wine makes one a connoisseur of the soul's vicissitudes. One feels great respect for everything, and for nothing at all. Wine shimmers with tact. If you are a friend of wine, you are also a friend of women and a protector of all that is dear to them. The relations, even the thorniest, that exist between man and woman unfold like blossoms from the depths of your glass. All the songs to wine that were ever composed ought to be acknowledged as justified. "For a Dätel, that's unsuitable," I was admonished not long ago in a certain house. Since then I have confined myself to gazing at this house from a distance, timidly and with a sensation of oddness. Dätel is the title for a soldier. In the military, you see, I was only a common soldier. Of course, this circumstance does me immeasurable harm. In this age of perspicacity, all things come under inspection, so why not, in particular, one's rank in the army? I see nothing amiss here."
10 stars. You know what to do.
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21 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Our Robber is a humble man w/an inborn pride of thieves, January 20, 2002
In review of writers far worthier than I, and contemporaneous of Walser: Robert Musil said: Walser writes as "an ice-skater executes his long curves & figures...these little endlessnesses waft over into the void...as in the hours between a suicide's decision and final act(1914). The most Illuminated of all assessors of literary greatness, Walter Benjamin said (admittedly of Walser's anti-fairy tales of himself in drag of Cinderella and Snow White): "Walser begins where the fairy-tale leaves off"(1929). But none has equaled what Elias Canetti wrote as late as 1978, with an angry unmercy for all critics who live off other writer's wounds: Walser is 'The most camouflaged of all writers (who) never formulates his motives...his work is an unflagging attempt at hushing his fear...and that is why it is sinister (the work, not the words)...as he escapes everywhere before too much fear gathers in him...in order to save himself...his experience with the 'struggle for existence' takes him into the only sphere where that struggle no longer exists: the madhouse, the monastery of modern times."
This is Robert 'Robber' Walser's last novel written before his grand finale of silence upon admittance unto the mad houses of final quietude. Beyond even the beautiful miracle of Rilke's Elegies or Bruno Schulz's phantastics, it's as if a Henri Rosseau painting were stepped in upon by lovingly devoted thieves who only want to live there a while...I recall Aleister Crowley's words speaking of a friend's madness: "It was if a man had stepped outside of himself to go on a long walk". That is what happened, so they say, 'Robber Walser' Did upon completing this holy novella in the poetic excesses of his Blakean view of the world where all's Holy. Intermingled as it is, with his own Dostoyevskian Doppelganger & fleeting doves of the Holy Ghost; in one of the most intimate of doubles Literature's ever known. Here in these pages whispers the secret treasure of a Robber, a writer, & a Walker, all centered around 'one singular man' name of Robert Walser. The watercolour on the cover is by his brother, Karl Walser, circa 1894; they were close as a Theo to a Vincent in our Robber's heart. This is the only known photograph of Walser's Robber, who reminds me of a cross betwix Billy the Kid & Peter Pan? We cannot spiritually afford to give the 'plot' away as Walser's words are all about Freedom from the bondage of one's inner demons, and therefore costs an unpronounceable price beyond even American currencys can purchase, amen. For those without the right amount of time to dedicate to All Walser wrote, I would refer them to the Quay Brothers film: 'Institute Benjamenta'---which is a rare species of film indeed to capture the dream world of our hero 'Jakob Von Gunten' in cinematic black-n-white exposure. Of Walser's supposed 'Mental InStability', (however undersimplified) I feel his suffering comprises a beautiful exception TO suffering; a rare species of 'beautiful suffering' had from his own Superbly Sound Sensitivity to Sensations a great many regrettables shall most likely never become aware of without the Romance of a Robber such as Walser's being born along inside us...on a romantic lark such as this carefully pocketed jeweled compass is sure to lead its thieves far, far away, to where 'Here Be Dragons' is writ on old incunabular maps. One merely has to read Walser, so unlike the multitude of unstable geniuses one need not make the sign of the cross to ward off the evil peering from inside so many ingenious but dangerously depressive works. Inside Walser's heartrending Romantic prose his ever-active eternal spirit takes on alarming fleshly precedence though still omnipotent enough to take over the world dressed in cool sunglasses shading that evil eye; in luminous gowns made of 'white magical' tissue paper, all the better equipped to wipe away tears at the same time as reading. The Robber respectfully bows deeply before all that's worthy of beauty, including every woman ever born so graceful a creature, A-men? Walser never screams but shouts out to greet every overcautious reader who dares to tread his pages lovingly; he never runs but walks at an amazingly quick-pace through literature, town & city, and of course, the vast countryside that replaced words for Walser to wander in; falling down dead one Christmas day in the snow; & as William H. Gass so poetically envisioned him at the end, falling down upon a field: "smoothly white as writing paper". There is nothing in this book a Robber would pawn without an excess of tears hot enough to scald the vision & heart from which they were taken, so innocently, out of boundless admiration & unrestrainable worship! If you read only one writer or one book in all of Earthly existence, let it be by Robert Walser, a humble man with an inborn pride of thieves; who takes from his own rich Heart and gives Poetic alms to those poorer in spirit or in need of fellow grievance, commiseration, companionship, or simple celebration before those horrid if 'entertaining thoughts of suicide' are finally exorcised from the Book of Life. Walser's books are integral in every first-aid literary kit for bandaging burnt souls and crushed spirits. Each sentence is like a shot of hot fiery spirits to chase away throats sore from yelling all the time, and at the ones they love sadly screaming the most. The subtle irony of each paragraph is stretched across the boards of Literary history to flatten out the riddles & wrinkles of a Kafkian love of cosmically-inclined intrigues & double meanings. The mystery is deep as a sea full of Leviathans; and Walser navigates straight through the groping tentacles of mythological monsters to purge the heart of all its fictions. He is, along with Hoffman, Goethe, Kleist, one of the Magical Immortals in the realm of Germanic & Romantic Phantastics. And without equal whence it comes to the one & only artistic pre-requisite of mine: Sincerity!
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by Robert Walser
by Robert Walser
by Robert Walser
by Robert Walser
by Susan Bernofsky
