Tag: NYRB

Forever before and after: Rombo by Esther Kinsky

The seismic shocks of May divided life and the landscape into a before and after. The before was the object of memory, stories unceasingly layered and blown over by words. One argued over the form of the cliffs, the course of the brooks, the trees that avalanches rolled over. About the whereabouts of objects, the order of things in the house, the fate of animals. Each of these arguments was an attempt at orientation, at carving a path through the rubble of masonry, mortar, split beams and shattered dishes, to understand the world anew. To begin living in a place anew. With one’s memories.

On May 6, 1976, just before 9:00 pm, a devastating earthquake tore through the Friuli district of northeastern Italy. Several strong quakes followed in September. Bordered, today, by Slovenia to the east and Austria to the north, this region which extends from the slopes and foothills of the Carnic Alps, onto the flat flood plain of the River Tagliamento, would be forever changed, as would the lives and memories of those who survived that year of death and destruction. Rombo, the latest novel by German poet and writer Esther Kinsky, places this event at its centre and turns its attention to the rich and deeply interwoven stories that bind the land and its inhabitants together.

As her novels River and Grove demonstrate, Kinsky is deeply sensitive to and observant of landscapes, urban and rural; her narratives move through environments that are simultaneously emotional and physical—spaces of memory, grief and reconciliation. The same can be said of Rombo, but here, instead of a peripatetic first person narrator tracing a deeply personal journey, a chorus of voices carry the flow of a unique, multi-layered narrative that encompasses the human and non-human, the animate and inanimate alike. The text is divided into seven sections, each opening with a quote from a classic geological work and a coarse black and white illustration depicting a fragment of the remaining frescos from the cathedral at Venzone. A neutral narrative voice describes the landscape and its history—present and past—offering observations of a geological, ecological, folkloric and scientific nature. Woven into this tapestry are the memories and stories of seven men and women—Anselmo, Olga, Mara, Lina, Gigi, Toni and Silvia—who were children or youth at the time of the earthquake, and whose reflections take them back to the events that forever divided their world into before and after.

This choral narrative flows and swirls like a river, rising and falling, turning in eddies, joined by streams and tributaries along the way. Moving back and forward in time, repetition, contradiction and fractured accounts are gradually woven together to create a rich, if heartbreaking, whole. In the beginning we are briefly introduced to the seven survivors, from a third person perspective, on May 6 and in the present, decades later. Then, the dynamics of the seismic event are set up, the unevenness of the impending disruption are alluded to, and the forces of the earth are unleashed:

It is said that animals are much quicker to sense the vibrations that gradually build up in the Earth’s interior and eventually exceed the stress limit in the spreading centre, causing the tectonic plates to snag and tip, irrevocably shifting the order of hollow cavities and mass, the order of emptiness and fullness.

For each one of the survivors, the hours leading up to the May earthquake were marked by unusual observations—an unexpected sighting of a snake, anxious goats, loudly barking dogs, fitfully chirping birds. The day was unseasonably hot, the light oddly filtered. And everyone remembers the otherworldly sound, il rombo, rising out of the ground just before it started to shake. In the moment, they are pushed out of their houses, stand under archways or find themselves crawling out from under collapsed structures. Damage is extensive but, all things considered, their village is one of the lucky ones. Others are almost completely destroyed.

After our first glimpse of that fateful day, the survivors begin to speak for themselves. They talk of their memories of life in the valley, their families, and their later adult years. But mostly they speak of the earthquake and its immediate aftermath—the strange, dislocated summer of freedom for the school-aged children, the stress of rebuilding and rising tensions among the adults and, amid the turmoil, the accommodation of marriages and deaths and the business of life. Then, when things are beginning to promise a return to some degree of normal, the severe September shocks roll through. Everything is unsettled again.

The lives and stories of some of the characters intersect, contradict one another or offer different angles on the same situations or experiences. Their individual histories reflect the historical and economic realities of the region. Fractured, multi-generational families are common as people are forced to leave to search for work, or driven back again by the need for the support of extended family. Anselmo and Olga, for instance, were both born abroad, in Germany and Venezuela respectively. They come to the valley with their locally born fathers after divorce or widowhood finds them stranded in foreign lands and brings them home. Some couples comfortably fall into a pattern of living in different towns or countries, like Silvia’s parents or Lina and her husband. After the earthquake, many will leave the region for good, having lost their jobs and their homes, but for the seven villagers featured here, including those who do leave for a time and return, the valley is and always will be home. As Lina says about the land and her place in it:

The soil is poor here. Limestone ground, the ground of poverty. The flowers are paler here than elsewhere. The winter is long. But winter is alright by us, because it brings snow and whatever grows around here has snow and goat shit to thank for it. The snow saturates the ground differently than the rain does, they always say. On the other side of the mountain, in the south, it only rains, even in winter no snow falls. It’s God’s pisser, the people say.

What is my life? sometimes I ask myself. My life is this place. Here I know everything. Every stick and every stone. The animals and the people. I write down what I want to remember. The weather, the harvest, the comings and goings, misfortunes. Surprises.

As these witnesses, now looking back through the filter of more than half a lifetime’s experience, recall the upheaval of the earthquake and talk about their lives before and since, their reminisces are framed and reframed through the shifting sedimentary layers of accumulated memory. Just like the land around them. Unfolding with an uneven, yet natural pace, the flow of personal stories, woven among the descriptive passages, observations and anecdotes, lends a filmic documentary-like feel to the novel, successfully achieving a Sebaldian balance of truths and fictions imbued with Kinsky’s distinctly meditative poetics. The result is an unusual and highly affecting form of storytelling that follows its own narrative logic.

Rombo: A Novel by Esther Kinsky is translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt and published by New York Review Books  in North America and Fitzcarraldo in the UK.

“The streets were never really mine”: Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri

Although he claims to feel no nostalgia, the narrator of Amit Chaudhuri’s most recent novel, Friend of My Youth, carries a wistful melancholy that can really be understood in no other way. It comes through in his discomfort and his attempt to articulate a mixed affection for and estrangement from the city in which he grew up—Bombay. Chaudhuri has woven a close line between his own life and the experiences and qualities he grants his characters before, but here he blurs it completely, even playfully. His protagonist is an author named Amit Chaudhuri, who is in the city to promote his latest release, The Immortals. If this is, on some level, a metafictional mechanism to reflect on the question of the relationship between an author and his narrator, it is exercised in such a light-handed, controlled, mildly self-deprecating manner, that it never risks becoming distracting or annoying. Chaudhuri is a restrained, thoughtful writer, and Friend of My Youth offers so much more. Set against the urban gridwork and landmarks of South Mumbai, a city, at the time, still recovering from the horror of the 2008 terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel, it is a quietly insistent meditation on the ways we try to make sense of our own personal and geographic histories over time.

From the beginning, the narrator confesses to an ambivalence toward his former hometown:

I feel a sense of purposelessness—is it the ennui of the book tour or book-related visit? Not entirely. No, it pertains to Bombay, to being returned to a city where one performed a function, reluctantly. Reluctance is fundamental. You don’t plunge into growing up; it happens in spite of you. Then, one day, it’s done: you’re ‘grown up’. You go away. Back now in the city of my growing up, there’s nothing more that can happen to me. I embrace a false busyness. I suppose I’m living life. Without necessarily meaning to. It doesn’t occur to me that the visit is part of my life. I believe I’ll resume life after it’s done.

But, although he has been back to the city many times in the decades since his family had moved back to their native Calcutta, and he himself had gone on to study and teach in the UK, there has always been one grounding constant—a friend from his school days, Ramu. On this occasion he learns that Ramu, whose life has been defined by drug addiction, is in intensive rehab and cannot be visited. Their friendship is strange, an attraction of opposites, one who would go on to achieve a degree of literary success and middle-class normalcy, the other troubled and stalled, unable to completely shake his demons, now in his fifties, still living in his family home with his sister. Theirs is an often awkward camaraderie, bound to a small geographical space in a city that has, over time, expanded exponentially beyond the confines of what has become known as South Mumbai. When Ramu is not there, Amit discovers that without this particular conduit to his past, whose eyes he had relied on, he is forced to encounter Bombay anew, even alone.

As the narrator traces his way through the city, a reflective uncertainty, a searching for words, underlines his thoughts. The prominent, well-known landmarks are laden with the hallmarks of his own idiosyncratic life history, from the restless eagerness to leave in adolescence and youth, to the regular returning, each opening shades of a city he knows he never really knew. How much, he wonders, was his inability to really see the city he grew up in rooted in a conviction that his origins as a Bengali prevented him and his family from ever full belonging, and encouraged his belief that his destiny lay elsewhere. If you feel, at heart, that you do not own a city, how can you truly see it?

So he is trying to make sense of his relationship to the city—and through that, to the shifting currents of memory and nostalgia that continue to haunt us all as we grow older. Ramu’s absence looms large. Who we believe we are is always, to some extent, measured and understood against the trajectories, real or imagined, of others.

I know I’ll see Ramu again. But it’s as if I won’t see him again. I’m thrown off-balance—but also surprised. I didn’t know I’d react like this. Ramu isn’t the only close friend I have. But it’s as if my sojourn in Bombay depends on him. ‘Depends’ is the wrong word: I haven’t come here because of him, to delve into his whereabouts. But the surprise I’ve mentioned is related to my astonishment at being here. ‘Astonishment’ denotes how you might start seeing things you hadn’t noticed earlier, but it could also mean becoming aware that you won’t see them again.  As I turn into Pherozeshah Mehta Road and then left into the long stretch of DN Road, I know I won’t see Bombay again. That is, I will see Bombay again, but not the Bombay I’m looking at now.

Toward the end of the book, two subsequent visits do bring Ramu back into Amit’s life, neither resolving nor further alienating his connection to the city. There is something oddly comforting in their unlikely location-specific friendship, one that speaks to the ineffable qualities of our own connections to the people and places that we leave, but can’t quite leave behind. This is a novel as much about loss and aging, as it is about recognizing that there are connections that perhaps we never really had, no matter how much time we spent with them.

I took this book to India with me, planning to read it in advance of my own recent visit to Bombay but, as it happened I did not open it until about a month after my return. Although familiarity with the city is by no means necessary, even a brief encounter will add an extra dimension because this is a novel so clearly linked to space. For those who know the city well, it will be potentially an even richer experience. I spent three days in the Fort area of South Bombay, visiting a few of the common tourist sites like Gateway of India and Marine Drive and attending several events at the Kala Ghoda Festival literary venue, the fabulous garden of the David Sassoon Library. I used Horniman Circle and Flora Fountain as guideposts and got lost in Churchgate, not realizing I was entering a train station (in my defense, the entry said “underpass” and I assumed I would avoid crossing one of the city’s notoriously congested roadways). All of these features or locations appear and it was fun to be able to immediately bring them to my imagination—mind you, without the emotional gravity with which Chaudhuri so effectively paints them.

Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and New York Review of Books in North America.

Some memory I’ve got, eh, young ladies? Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal

“…yes, tragedy rules the world and writers always have something to write about…”

The passionate interlocutor who commandeers the pages of Bohumil Hrabal’s breathlessly intense monologue/novella, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, is perhaps one of the most absurdly memorable narrators one could want to meet. For a little over 100 pages he entertains a group of sunbathing young women, engaging them with rapturous tales – the taller the better – peppered with endless asides, diversions and commentaries. Apart from commas and the occasional question or exclamation marks, there are no real sentence breaks; no full stops, not even at the very end of this glorious single sentence verbal escapade.

Dancing-Lessons-for-the-Advanced-in-Age_1024x1024The genesis of this early, experimental work lay in a series of texts Hrabal transcribed in 1949, at the elbow of his Uncle Pepin, an inveterate raconteur who will, himself, feature as character in his nephew’s later works. These tales were originally gathered as a collection titled The Sufferings of Old Werther which, as it turned out, was never published. But, as any decent storyteller in possession of a goldmine knows, no good tale dare go untold. So these stories were dismantled, literally cut and pasted, reworked, and recycled into the present novel which was originally released in 1964 – one of a number of diverse works that Hrabal would publish in the early 1960’s.

The narrator at the centre of Dancing Lessons, is what Hrabal called a pábitel (typically translated into English as “palaverer”), a dreamer caught up in his own world of memory, spilling forth an endless stream of anecdotes, tragic-comic observations, and beer hall philosophy. Here we have an old man who, without unnecessary delay, launches straight into an account of his past exploits as a soldier, cobbler, brewmaster and, in his own mind at least, legendary womanizer. His narrative spins off into so many diversions and asides that his audience has no option but to submit to the whirlwind:

“… here I am pushing seventy and having the time of my life with you like the emperor with that Schratt lady, promising you red leather pumps like the ones I made for Doctor Karafiát’s sister, who was a beauty, but had one glass eye, which is a problem, because you never know what it’s going to do next, a hatter from Prostějov once told me he took a woman with a glass eye to the pictures and she sneezed and it flew out and during the break they had to go crawling under the seats for it, but she found it wiped it off, pulled up her eyelid, and pop! in it went, by the way, baking is as much of an art as shoemaking, my brother Adolph was a trained baker…”

And on he goes. You get the idea. His asides are often as brutal as they are hilarious. With suitably ribald and absurd black humour, they are just as frequently both at once. Characters surface briefly, generally to either amorous or unfortunate ends, but, throughout the monologue, his banter does tend to revolve around themes – his experiences at the front during the war, the qualities of well fashioned footwear, the technical aspects of brewing beer, or the unlikelihood of achieving marital bliss. Eventually, in true beer hall fashion, the narrative becomes dominated by a series of pissing contests toward the end. After all, a lot of beer is consumed in the course of these tales, it has to go somewhere!

An admirer of the “European Renaissance”, his euphemism for sex, our hero is guided by the wisdom of two essential texts that resurface repeatedly throughout the course of his monologue and add to a sense of continuity. One is a handbook on sexual hygiene ascribed to a Mr. Batista who warns, for instance, “men against giving in to their passions, no more than three times an afternoon or four times for Catholics, to prevent sinful thoughts from taking shape”. The other guidebook from which he quotes regularly is Anna Nováková’s book of dreams that conveniently offers explanations – even handy excuses – to be gleaned from nocturnal imagery: “holding a dead man’s watch means a wedding and being locked in an insane asylum means a great fortune awaits you!” or how repeatedly dreaming about canaries in cages would mean one “would always long for freedom”.

When it comes to the ladies, our narrator has an insatiable appetite and no shortage of offers that tumble, often one into another, in his recollections. Even in the hospital recovering from surgery, while his rugged blacksmith roommate succumbs to pneumonia, he confesses that :

“… I was the only one who came out on top, a pretty nurse served me pheasant and asked me why I wasn’t married, why I let so fine a body go to waste, and for an answer I slipped out from under the covers and was about to give her a dancing lesson when they chased me back to bed because after a hernia operation they make you lie there like a corpse, a giant of a girl, but beautiful, once called to me from the Elbe, Come in to the water and I’ll give you a kiss, so in I went – neck deep, clothes and all – and got my prize, a hero once more, back on land I had to wring out more than my clothes, I’d just picked up my pay in ten-crown notes, and there I stood in my underpants, the women rushing down to the river to have a look at me, the whole town on its feet, yes…”

The ineffable character of Hrabal’s unstoppable narrator lends an infectious momentum to this novella. It also allows him to blend in a backhanded social and political commentary, often in the manner of an unreserved sentimentality for a bygone era. As Adam Thirlwell indicates in his introduction, Hrabal’s fiction simultaneously lingers on and evades what it is trying to say. One sentence can easily be contradicted by the that follows.

“But Hrabal’s technique is so moving, finally, because the world historical past is only an element of our universal nostalgia. For ‘in the days of the monarchy shoemaking was more chemistry than craft,’ laments our hero, ‘ today it’s all conveyor belts, I was a shoemaker, but I wore a pince-nez and carried a stick with a silver mounting because back then everyone wanted to look like a composer or a poet’…”  (Introduction)

In his joy for the “good old days”, there is a melancholy need to preserve proof of the trauma, not only of the past, but presumably of the present circumstances as well. Hrabal and his fellow artists were, at the time this book was published, working under the restrictions of the Communist government, a situation that would become more oppressive in the years to come.

But as his erstwhile rogue – at once grandiose, hysterical and fatalistic – wishes to remind the reader, worthwhile literature should cut sharply:

“… which must be why Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you’d forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your handkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out…”

Oh yes.

* Translated by Michael Henry Heim, with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is available from NYRB Classics.

The heartbreak of a parent’s love: Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi

“How children suffer for their parents, and parents for their children.”

The setting is Sárszeg, a fictional Hungarian town at the turn of the twentieth century, a nondescript dusty community with one black topped road and its own illusions of class and society aspirations – a fine restaurant, a theatre and a gentleman’s club – but for anyone with eyes on true cosmopolitan existence it is but a provincial backwater. To the Vajkays, Ákos, his wife, and his daughter Skylark, it is home. They live quietly, increasingly keeping to themselves over the years. Father has taken an early retirement for health reasons and spends his days pouring over historical volumes, tracing out family trees and studying heraldry. Mother tends house with the assistance, or perhaps under the direction, of her daughter, who, at age 35, can safely be considered a spinster beyond the faintest chance of any marriage prospects.skylark

Unfolding with the feeling, at least on the surface, of a gentle fable, this short novel by Hungarian author Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936) covers the span of one week in the lives of the Vajkay family. At the outset Mother and Father (and that is what they are most frequently called) are diligently cramming everything their beloved daughter may reasonably require into an old suitcase in preparation for her visit to her aunt and uncle in the country. The week that she will be away is the longest that they have ever been parted.

As the train carries Skylark away, her parents stand on the platform, rather numb and bereft. How will they make it through the long days ahead? They have always been a unit though, truth be told, fate, not choice has rendered the situation thus. The couple had long since discarded the serious hope that their homely daughter would secure a suitor. Only the vaguest flickers remained and they did not burn bright. And that fact bound them to her ever more closely with each passing year:

“Skylark was a good girl, Ákos would often say, to himself as much as anyone else. A very good girl, his only pride and joy.

He knew she was not pretty, poor thing, and for a long time this had cut him to the quick. Later he began to see her less clearly, her image gradually blurring in a dull and numbing fog. Without really thinking any more, he loved her as she was, loved her boundlessly.”

Skylark’s absence in their home is felt acutely at first. The hollowness weighs in on her parents. Having decided to eat out while their primary cook is away, the couple (referred to as “elderly” though they are only in their late 50s) reluctantly take themselves off to the King of Hungary, the restaurant their daughter has assured them is passable if less than desirable on all counts. It was the best option. Cultivating condescending opinions of almost any aspect of community life was a popular Vajkay family pastime – a practice that achieved little more than to assure their social isolation. Yet, away from Skylark’s influence, Father is soon delighting in the restaurant’s gastronomic offerings, reconnecting with his circle of old friends, and even enjoying a little alcohol and a cigar after a lengthy period of health related abstinence. Their resurfacing in public does not go by unnoticed:

“Strangers turned to look at them as they passed. Not that there was anything unusual about their appearance. People simply weren’t accustomed to seeing them there in the street, like old couches that belong in the living room and look so strange when, once or twice a year, they’re put outside to air.”

Soon the couple is invited to the theatre, Mother buys a crocodile handbag for the occasion and together they are warmly welcomed back into the life of the town. The flurry of excitement they experience, freed from the strict influence of their daughter, surprises them both. But when Ákos returns from his triumphant re-appearance at the local gentlemen’s club’s regular Thursday night dinner obnoxiously intoxicated, Mother and Father are forced to confront an ugly suspicion that both have harboured but neither has dared to speak: Do they still love their daughter? Or has pity has matured into hate? The tension that builds from that point forward takes a sharp twist the following evening when Skylark’s train is greatly delayed.

Filled with a cast of eccentric secondary characters, and fueled by a mildly sarcastic humour, Skylark is tale is told in a highly entertaining, direct manner that moves at a strong, steady pace to a simple yet heartrending conclusion. This is a fundamentally human story. At its core is a poignant truth that each member of this small family carries in his or her own way – a deep sadness that holds them together and defines them in their world.

kosztolanyi2Published in 1924, Skylark was Kosztolányi’s third novel. He started out as a journalist before turning to poetry and then fiction. He was also an important critic and translator and, in 1931, he served as the first president of the Hungarian PEN Club.

1924-ClubThis NYRB edition features an extensive introduction by Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy which not only details the author’s life but examines the significant impact he had on the Hungarian language itself. The translator of the text and introduction is Richard Aczel.

Dark brightness and bright darkness: Berlin Stories by Robert Walser

“Up above is a narrow strip of sky, and the smooth, dark ground below looks as if it’s been polished by human destinies. The buildings to either side rise boldly, daintily, and fantastically into architectural heights. The air quivers and startles with worldly life… And always people are walking here. Never in all the time this street has existed has life stopped circulating here. This is the very heart, the ceaselessly respiring breast of metropolitan life. It is a place of deep inhalations and mighty exhalations, as if life itself felt disagreeably constricted by its own pace and course.”

Great cities have their own personalities and in the company of Swiss writer Robert Walser, Berlin of the early twentieth century becomes a living, breathing entity, a dynamic metropolis drawing in the ambitious, the hopeful and the desperate in equal measure. As a guide to the city, its haunts, and its colourful inhabitants, he is endlessly engaging. His name has been surfacing in my consciousness for a while now, but I had not gotten more than a few stories into this collection before I wondered why it had taken me so long to “discover” him for myself.

BerlinBerlin Stories from New York Review of Books is a collection of short stories composed during Walser’s years in Berlin and the first few years after he left, originally edited and organized by German Walser scholar, Jochen Greven. In her introduction to this edition, translator Susan Bernofsky tells us that, with the beginnings of a literary career underway, Robert Walser moved to Berlin in 1907 at the age of 27. His brother had already enjoyed success as a set designer in the thriving theatre scene. The city was bursting with life. Over the next six years he would record that life in short stories or “prose pieces” and three novels. But financial security eluded him and his own eccentricities did not help him secure the patronage that would have benefited him. He returned to Switzerland in 1913.

The pieces in Berlin Stories are divided into four sections or “movements”: The City Streets, The Theatre, Berlin Life and Looking Back. Most of the pieces are quite short, often no more than a page or two. Narrators who may or may not be Walser himself, wander the streets, ride the trams, or take in theatrical performances while offering attentive discourses on the sights and experiences of city life. He can be thoughtful, melancholy, humourous or sarcastic, sometimes striking playful barbs at contemporaries.

As with any collection of short works, especially one with 38 stories, it is hard to capture a sense of the volume in a brief review. There is so much magic in these pages, it is difficult not to marvel at the acuity of Walser’s observations. He is especially gifted at peering behind the glitz and creating moving accounts of what Bernofsky calls the “humbler aspects of city life”. He has an uncanny eye for the small details that play across the faces and animate the actions of the characters he sketches. Sometimes his observations are direct, at other times his intentions are delivered with a deft backhand as in “The Little Berliner” a story in which he takes the voice of a precocious 12 year-old girl, who enjoys a life of wealth and privilege. But all is not as wonderful as one might suspect. She reports that: “For reasons whose depths I cannot understand and consequently cannot evaluate, my parents live apart. Most of the time I live with Father.” She admonishes herself for confessing to her diary, but Father, for all his wealth and charm, is sometimes a very angry and unpleasant man. The observations and attitudes swirling around in her child’s head present a rather caustic view of the rich delievered in a wonderfully clever way.

Another piece I really enjoyed for its pure descriptive power is “Fire”, in which the narrator and his companion get caught up in the excitement of what must have been a fairly regular occurrence at this time – a house on fire. A spectacle drawing the curious, it is an event at once ordinary and extraordinary:

“an entire street is brightly, garishly lit up by it, it resembles a sunset in the distant south, ten evenings ablaze, a host of suns setting in unison. You see the façades of buildings looking like pale-yellow paper, and the bright red glow of the fire approaches, a thick glowing, wounded red, and beside it the street lanterns look like feebly burning damp matches.”

No one is injured in this instance but a distinguished old piece of architecture is lost, a fact greeted by one of the observers as a healthy form of natural selection, clearing out the dead wood and making room for new construction.

I could go and quote from this work at length, there are little gems nestled in almost every piece. More than 100 years on, his work is vital, entertaining and immensely readable. At the height of his career he was a favourite of Kafka, Musil, Hesse and Walter Benjamin. The resonance of his voice has carried on through the influence of those who admired his work giving it the immediacy that feels so surprising when one first encounters him now. In his lifetime which was increasingly spent in mental asylums, Walser seemed to disappear off the radar. Greven’s German scholarship in the 1950s and the first English translation of his work not long before Walser’s death in 1956, brought him to the attention of a new generation of highly influential writers including WG Sebald, Peter Handke and JM Coetzee.

Now, if you have yet to make the acquaintance of Robert Walser, hurry along and check him out. Personally I’m sold and can’t wait to read more.