Bernofsky brings alive the brilliant Berlin world in which Karl – with Robert in his wake – moved ... Bernofsky makes us feel, too, Robert’s unease at much of this, especially the high-octane social life ... Bernofsky gives us a persuasive analysis of [Der Räuber] with its modernist shifting synthesis of narrator and central character ... [An] authoritative, moving biography.

To talk about Robert Walser in a Walserian way, one needs to start with the small things, as it was those that truly gave his writing its essence. Susan Bernofsky, writer and literary translator, does just that ... an affectionate, precise piece of writing that illustrates a man of complexities both personal and professional. It is an intimate portrait of an artist, soul-crushing in its realism, with all its valor and rigor. Reading Walser’s life, lived in between furnished rooms and towns, in between long walks, in between fame and complete isolation, the bearings of these events become more and more profound. Bernofsky has previously translated many works of Walser and she sees through the many hidden layers of his writing with well-informed clarity, scrutinizing his words with the mind of a translator and the heart of an admirer. Nothing of Walser’s methodical yet itinerant prose is lost on Bernofsky; on the contrary, it finds more meaning as the protagonist of another writer’s work ... Bernofsky doesn’t try to answer the unanswerable and successfully resists categorizing Walser and his work. She gracefully discusses the elements of his persona that are difficult to pinpoint, like his sexuality, inclination to servitude, and later years spent in mental institutions. These parts of the book offer no assumptions but factual evidence ... stays true to the Walserian spirit, paying delicate attention to details and telling the story of the writer in a fluent, rhythmic narration.

Well, here it is, I’m happy to say, an accurate, independent, and well-researched English life of the pauper, walker, novelist, and most heterogeneous of authors...a life made by Bernofsky from Alps as much as archives—no sparing of shoe-leather here—and still without the prolixity that spoils so many biographies these days ... styles are important, and Bernofsky writes about them perceptively and with compassion. Truly, Walser is a handwriter who dreamed of succeeding as an original author but was often forced to return to copy work and clerking ... a book that seems to deepen and find itself as it goes along, her impressive last forty pages, The Quiet Years: 1929–1956, show her at her most resolutely delicate and forbearing ... we get a book that is (by design) not a scintillating or hard-edged character study. That is not so much the 'who' as the 'how' or mainly the 'how not' of Robert Walser—the movement of this eccentric Brownian particle through zones of poverty, independence, mannerliness, provocation, and a sort of manic positivity.

... a triumph: an accessible, engaging, brilliant exploration of the intertwining of life and work ... Bernofsky could not be more lucid about Walser’s life. But she is equally illuminating about the characteristics of his writing. Her close readings fizz with energy and intellect ... Too bad Bernofsky’s language gets labored in such moments, for she is otherwise so clear. To be fair, Walser’s writing is as difficult as what she wants to say about it ... Bernofsky side-steps the relation of his national origin to his writing. Is there something like a Swiss ethos? If so, how does Walser reflect it? Does he perhaps shape it to his purposes? These questions go unanswered, which is a shame because her liberal use of questions is one of the most distinctive features of her book ... For me, Bernofsky’s repeated hanging questions are a way to get close to Walser while still remaining distant. In so doing, she speaks for her subject but honors the reserve he needed to survive ... Bernofsky doesn’t just write about them; in her questioning style, she manifests them ... The writer of The Secretary could not have imagined a better secretary.

... erudite, painstakingly thorough, and sensitively written. Readers of Walser finally have a volume that connects the development of the writer’s work and its publishing history to the various episodes of his peripatetic adult life in the cities of Biel, Bern, Zurich, and Berlin and finally in the sanatoriums in Waldau and later Herisau ... One of the book’s greatest treats comes when Bernofsky delves into Walser’s late style ... Occasionally, Bernofsky seems to be offering Walser career advice...These are reasonable enough considerations, and one feels a touch of anguish on Bernofsky’s part at Walser’s incorrigible self-sabotage. But this is also the kind of advice the writer scorned throughout his professional life.

In her new biography Clairvoyant of the Small, translator Susan Bernofsky admits that little is known about Walser’s final decades (certainly a great deal was going on outside the oblivion of Walserworld at this time), but when he was publishing he was known and admired ... Bernofsky is deeply fond of Walser ... he loves his syntactical and semantic complexity, his impulsive aleatory connections, his permeating irony, his verbal opulence, his neologistic compounds, his relativizing adverbs, his empowering way of rejecting power ... Clairvoyant of the Small [...] accumulates with details of no great import, such as a lengthy list of Walser’s known addresses ... An unwaveringly committed fan, Bernofsky is often tempted to float above some of her subject’s more unsettling behavior.

Ms. Bernofsky wants to peer behind the smiling naïf to better glimpse the lonely, erratic artist beset by poverty and oppressed by failure who would spend the final 28 years of his life institutionalized, writing almost nothing at all ... For a figure as quirky as Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small can be surprisingly hidebound, dwelling mostly in dry historical records, but it improves in the final period of Walser’s life, when the archives thin out.

Translator Bernofsky [...] teases out misperceptions about 'unwaveringly devoted' Swiss author Robert Walser (1878–1956) in this masterful biography ... With skillful and lucid readings of Walser’s work, Bernofsky succeeds in creating a portrait of Walser ... This balanced and meticulous account shines a bright light on a misunderstood and influential writer.