The Walk

"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