The Robber – hinnat ja saatavuus

"An eccentric modernist fairy tale rediscoverd more than 25 years after its German publication and 75 years after it was first written. . . . (T)he novel substitutes clever wordplay for plot, building up beautiful scenarios and tearing them down again."--Publishers Weekly. "The Robber, a large novel writ small-in microscript-didn't reach print in its original German until 1972. Now, to the great benefit of all of us who haven't microscopes, comes Susan Bernofsky's triumphant translation of this extraordinary novel, one of the true wonders of the European fictional world. If you are fond of pleasure postponed, of insertions, digressions, concealments-and who is not?-this maze will amaze you. This translation has caught it all: you will scratch your head; you will laugh out loud."-William H. Gass. The Robber, Robert Walser's last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby's mouth as an ashtray. Walser's novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview. Robert Walser (1878-1956), the Swiss-German master of high modernist prose, was once so well known that the novelist Robert Musil, reviewing Franz Kafka's first book of stories, described Kafka as "a special case of the Walser type." Susan Bernofsky is an assistant professor of German at Bard College and the translator of short prose by Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Gregor von Rezzori's Anecdotage.