New Directions Pearls

By: Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky (Translator)

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23 May 2012

At a Glance

No. of Pages
96

Dimensions(cm)
18 x 11.7 x 1

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A pseudo-biographical "stroll" through town and countryside rife with philosophical musings, The Walk has been hailed as the masterpiece of Walser's short prose. Walking features heavily in his writing, but nowhere else is it as elegantly considered. Without walking, "I would be dead," Walser explains, "and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed. Because it is on walks that the lore of nature and the lore of the country are revealed, charming and graceful, to the sense and eyes of the observant walker." The Walk was the first piece of Walser's work to appear in English, and the only one translated before his death. However, Walser heavily revised his most famous novella, altering nearly every sentence, rendering the baroque tone of his tale into something more spare. An introduction by translator Susan Bernofsky explains the history of The Walk, and the differences between its two versions.

Industry Reviews

"Incredibly interesting and beautiful." -- John Ashbery "One of the most profound products of modern literature." -- Walter Benjamin "The Walk is a good place to start reading Walser, and offers a kind of bridge between the novels and the microscripts... The walk is a search for freedom, is an act of freedom itself, and the writing feels free to launch into invective, or drape itself in courtesy, as it pleases. It is an attempt to approximate writing to life, to subject it to circumstance and chance encounter, but for all its overt artificiality the story is deeply affecting." -- The Times Literary Supplement "Walser's project is mirrored and echoed by modernity's general obsession with interiority and exploring new forms of subjectivity. We should understand Walser's poetics of smallness as being as grandiose as anything that modernity has produced." -- The Quarterly Conversation "The hope that shines forth in the moments of self-knowledge, transcendence, and grace Walser describes is anything but meager: on the contrary, it is exultation the writer feels when he perceives the sublime in the tiniest details of everyday life." -- The Brooklyn Rail

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