Novel;
Translated by Susan Bernofsky; Introduction
by W.G. Sebald
TIME
OUT NEW YORK’S READ FOR SUMMER 2009
The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters,
is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator
Susan Bernofsky. Three brothers and a sister comprise the Tanner family—Simon,
Kaspar, Klaus, and Hedwig: their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels,
romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a year or two
are the threads from which Walser weaves his airy, strange and brightly gorgeous
fabric. “Walser’s lightness is lighter than light,” as Tom Whalen said in Bookforum: “buoyant
up to and beyond belief, terrifyingly light.”
Robert Walser—admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin—is a radiantly
original author. He has been acclaimed “unforgettable, heart-rending” (J.M. Coetzee),
“a bewitched genius” (Newsweek), and “a major, truly wonderful, heart-breaking
writer” (Susan Sontag). Considering Walser’s “perfect and serene oddity,” Michael
Hofmann in The London Review of Books remarked on the “Buster Keaton-like
indomitably sad cheerfulness [that is] most hilariously disturbing.” The
Los Angeles Times called him “the dreamy confectionary snowflake of German
language fiction. He also might be the single most underrated writer of the 20th
century . . . . The gait of his language is quieter than a kitten’s.”
“A clairvoyant
of the small” W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser, one of his favorite writers
in the world, in his acutely beautiful, personal, and long introduction,
studded with his signature use of photographs.
“The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist
who…can be placed in that comic tradition [that] runs from Gogol through Kafka
and down to José Saramago . . . . When Walser met Lenin in Zurich during the
war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’ . . . It is remarkable
to see what variety and richness what easiness and charm, what winsome inanities
and philosophical depths he could pack into half a page.”
—Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker
