The Walk by Robert Walser

The Walk by Robert Walser

Robert Walser's preferred alternate version of his classic tale. In a new translation by Susan Bernofsky, The Walk is an elegant consideration of walking and the philosophical musings it engenders.

"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

Robert Walser (1878–1956) was born in Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence working as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant while producing essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium—where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad." Susan Bernofsky is the acclaimed translator of Hermann Hesse, Robert Walser, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and the recipient of many awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation at Columbia University and lives in New York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780811219921
ISBN 10	0811219925
Title	The Walk
Author	Robert Walser
Series	New Directions Pearls
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Year published	2012-06-01
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.