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Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, reduced form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny antlike pencil markings a millimeter high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first misconstrued as secret code, the microscripts were eventually found to be a form of German script so radically miniaturized that an entire story might fit on the back of a business card.
Selected from the six-volume German original, these twenty-five short pieces address schnapps, rotten husbands, small-town life, elegant jaunts, the radio, swine (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, and marriage proposals. This is the first English translation of Walser's work to be accompanied by facsimiles of the original microscripts and the original German texts.
Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), one of the major European writers of the early twentieth century, worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before writing as many as seven novels and more, than a thousand stories. Forcibly hospitalized in 1933 with a now much disputed, diagnosis of schizophrenia, he spent the final twenty-three years of his life in an institution.
"Walser vaulted new heights of expression with miniscule means."
”
Secrets, Not Code: On Robert Walser's Microscripts Susan Bernofsky 9
Microscripts Susan Bernofsky
Radio 23
Swine 27
If I am properly informed 34
What a nice writer I ran into not long ago 35
The Songstress 36
The Demanding Fellow 38
Somewhere and somewhen 40
The Train Station (II) 42
Crisis 45
So here was a book again 49
Is it perhaps my immaturity 53
The Prodigal Son 54
Usually I first put on a prose piece jacket 59
My subject here is a victor 65
A will to shake that refined individual 69
He numbered, as might well have been true 71
Journey to a Small Town 75
The Marriage Proposal 83
Autumn (II) 87
A Sort of Cleopatra 91
The failure to prize the chance 95
As I was instructed by a book 99
Schnapps 101
New Year's Page 105
Robert Walser Walter Benjamin 109
About the Microscripts 115
About the German Texts 118
Original German texts transcribed Bernhard Echte Werner Morlang 119
Notes 155
Acknowledgments 159
Overview
Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, reduced form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny antlike pencil markings a millimeter high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first misconstrued as secret code, the microscripts were eventually found to be a form of German script so radically miniaturized that an entire story might fit on the back of a business card.
Selected from the six-volume German original, these ...