Robert Walser

"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.

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.

Drawing from contemporary journalism, reviews, program notes, memoirs, interviews, and other sources, Keeping Time lets you experience, first hand, the controversies and critical issues that have accompanied jazz from its very birth. Edited by Robert Walser, these sixty-two thought provoking pieces offer a wealth of insight into jazz. Some of the giants of jazz speak to us here, including Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Wynton Marsalis. And there are pieces by writers such as Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, and Ralph Ellison, and by critics such as Leonard Feather and Gunther Schuller. Readers will find Louis Armstrong on what makes swing, Dizzy Gillespie on bebop, and Miles Davis on jazz-rock fusion. Equally important, Walser has selected writings that capture the passionate reactions of people who have loved, hated, supported, and argued about jazz. One can read, for instance, a dismissive article written in 1918 that relegates jazz to the "servant's hall of music" along with "the clatter of the clogs, the click of Slavic heels." Or a debate between Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock over the merits of free jazz and electric instruments. Or Duke Ellington's claim that jazz is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but "goes back to something just about as old-and as natural-as the circulation of the blood." In the end, the focus here remains on how the music works and why people have cared about it. Filled with passionately felt, insightful writing, Keeping Time will increase one's historical awareness of jazz even as it provokes lively discussion among jazz aficionados, whether in clubs, concert halls or classrooms.

Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces. Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Today Robert Walser is widely regarded as one of the most important and original literary voices of the twentieth century. In "Masquerade" and Other Stories, Susan Bernofsky presents a representative selection of Walser's work, from his first published fiction to the stately prose of the last years before his voice vanished forever behind the asylum walls. Written between 1899 and 1933, these 64 sketches, scenes, stories, and wanderings through landscapes and dreamscapes are characterized by startling, skewed comparisons, warpings of syntax, vagaries of perspective, and a delight in contradiction. Quirky, playful, and sometimes bizarre, Walser's texts were unconventional by the standards of the early twentieth century. They are still innovative in the context of today's fiction.

Der 24-jährige Joseph Marti wird nach längerer Stellenlosigkeit als kaufmännischer Angestellter in das technische Büro des Ingenieurs und Erfinders C. Tobler nach Bärenswil vermittelt. Tobler hat sein gesamtes Vermögen in Erfindungen investiert, für die sich niemand interessiert. Neben den zu führenden Korrespondenzen, in der Regel diktierte hochtrabende Bittschreiben, erstrecken sich Martis Pflichten auch auf häusliche und familiäre Dienste. Dafür bewohnt er das Turmzimmer der repräsentativen toblerschen Villa Abendstern und genießt die großzügigen Mahlzeiten gemeinsam mit der Familie. Je unaufhaltsamer Toblers Bankrott wird, umso mehr wird aus dem kaufmännischen Angestellten ein Diener des Hauses, der von seinem zahlungsunfähigen, hochstaplerischen Prinzipal statt Lohn ein sonntägliches Taschengeld erhält. Ein halbes Jahr nach Dienstantritt verlässt Marti am Neujahrsmorgen das ruinierte toblersche Anwesen. Damit sieht sich der nach Zugehörigkeit und familiärer Bindung sehnende Gehilfe erneut zurückgeworfen auf eine unsichere Existenz, die geprägt ist von Ungewissheit und Ortslosigkeit.