Little Snow Landscape

December 21, 2020
This charming edition of his short stories and essays by the Swiss writer Walser (1878-1956), selected and translated by Whalen (who also translated Walser’s Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories), is a testament to the author’s virtuosity. In the archly droll “Farewell,” Walser tries on the voice of Turkey’s final sultan shortly after being dethroned (“I think I was at least something of a personality on the throne,” he narrates, lamenting a new era of bureaucracy). “The Sausage” describes a “wonderfully smoked” wurst with a “bewitching fragrance,” which the narrator regrets having already eaten, a comic piece informed by Whalen’s biographical note about Walser’s chronic poverty. Frequently, the narrators go for walks, such as through the title story’s “rich lovely countryside” that is as “winsome” as a “good little kitten that’s just groomed itself.” In reading these short pieces, translated with mastery and attention to emotional nuance, one is struck by the author’s abiding good nature and boundless sympathy for his milieu. Walser enthusiasts will find much to love here.

March 1, 2021
A new collection of Walser's short prose presents fresh angles from which English-language readers may puzzle over the influential but enigmatic Swiss modernist. Spanning from 1905, following the publication of his first book, until 1933, after Walser was institutionalized, the pieces aggregated in this volume include peripatetic musings, character sketches, diary-like observations, and compact reveries. All pulse with Walser's organic observations, his melancholic dreaminess, and his relentless wandering. In their brevity but also their urgency, they resemble today's flash fiction. Few are longer than three pages. It's tempting to view these short works as test-runs for longer explorations or even fragments of a polyphonic, unfinished biographical novel; indeed, Walser himself suggests as much. In "A Sort of Narrative," he describes himself as "a kind of artisan novelist," writing "a multifariously cut-up or ripped-apart book of the self." Yet most of this volume's components are capable of standing on their own as tiny epiphanies, each a revelation in miniature. Flitting as he does from one small portrait to the next, Walser hints at strong feelings, kept at a distance through constant motion.

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