Positive4columnsWalser concentrated now on small, strange, intimate—what, exactly? Stories? Essays? Fables? Memoirs? Travel writings? In his translator’s note, Tom Whalen, who has selected sixty-nine pieces (only three have appeared in English before), lists all of these genres and more: a mischievous diversity, held together by a uniform but highly ambiguous tone. All miniatures, the longest running to ten pages, the shortest half a page ... A doubt pursues the reader of Walser’s fragments: maybe all of his narrators are unreliable. On the one hand, he is a writer of pastoral idylls of quite bewitching calm, pitched between medieval dream poem and Romantic interlude.
