The Robber - Softcover

"In an informative introduction, the translator Bernofsky sets out the pragmatic context of this writer and his work: a novel published posthumously in 1972, written by an author secretively during the twenties, his years in Bern, Switzerland. . . . It was an acrobatic act to translate this novel, for Walser spares his silent reader no effort to follow his dazzling train of thought. . . . Susan Bernofsky has achieved what every good translator aspires to: Her work reads like an original English text."-Josef Schmidt, International Fiction Review * International Fiction Review * "The Robber, a large novel writ small-in microscript-didn't reach print in its original German until 1972. Now, to the great benefit of all of us who haven't microscopes, comes Susan Bernofsky's triumphant translation of this extraordinary novel, one of the true wonders of the European fictional world. If you are fond of pleasure postponed, of insertions, digressions, concealments-and who is not?-this maze will amaze you. This translation has caught it all: you will scratch your head; you will laugh out loud."-William H. Gass -- William H. Gass "[The Robber's] charm lies in its surprising twists and turns of direction, its delicately ironic handling of the formulas of amatory play, and its supple and inventive exploitation of the resources of German. . . . Susan Bernofsky rises splendidly to the challenge of late Walser, particularly his play with the compound formations to which German is so hospitable. . . . The Robber is more or less contemporary in composition with Joyce's Ulysses and with the later volumes of Proust's Rechere. Had it been published in 1926 it might have affected the course of modern German literature, opening up and even legitimating as a subject the adventures of the writing (or dreaming) self and the meandering line of ink (or pencil) that emerges under the writing hand."-J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books -- J. M. Coetzee * New York Review of Books * "A charmingly goofy display of one of the most quintessentially liberating of all modern literary imaginations. Reading Walser (whose other fiction includes the memorable Jakob von Gunten) may very well make you a much saner and nicer person. At the very least, it'll make your day."-Kirkus Reviews * Kirkus Reviews * "It's the sharp observation of the mundane details of daily existence in a smallish European city after World War I that helps keep the reader grounded. The narrative twists and leaps, along with asides bout the writing process, give the book a hectic energy."-Booklist * Booklist * "An eccentric modernist fairy tale rediscoverd more than 25 years after its German publication and 75 years after it was first written. . . . The novel substitutes clever wordplay for plot, building up beautiful scenarios and tearing them down again.."-Publishers Weekly * Publishers Weekly *

The Robber, Robert Walser's last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby's mouth as an ashtray. Walser's novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview. Robert Walser (1878-1956), the Swiss-German master of high modernist prose, was once so well known that the novelist Robert Musil, reviewing Franz Kafka's first book of stories, described Kafka as "a special case of the Walser type." Susan Bernofsky is an assistant professor of German at Bard College and the translator of short prose by Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Gregor von Rezzori's Anecdotage.