The Missing Link Between Kleist and Kafka

Susan Sontag said that, of Robert Walser. She also called him "A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett ...." Thanks to the New York Review of Books link, Walser is enjoying a modest resurgence. Here he is on "A Little Ramble" in Switzerland in 1914.

I walked through the mountains today. The weather was damp, and the entire region was gray. But the road was soft and in places very clean. At first I had my coat on; soon, however, I pulled it off, folded it together, and laid it upon my arm. The walk on the wonderful road gave me more and ever more pleasure; first it went up and then descended again. The mountains were huge, they seemed to go around. The whole mountainous world appeared to me like an enormous theater. The road snuggled up splendidly to the mountainsides. Then I came down into a deep ravine, a river roared at my feet, a train rushed past me with magnificent white smoke. The road went through the ravine like a smooth white stream, and as I walked on, to me it was as if the narrow valley were bending and winding around itself. Gray clouds lay on the mountains as though that were their resting place. I met a young traveler with a rucksack on his back, who asked if I had seen two other young fellows. No, I said. Had I come here from very far? Yes, I said, and went farther on my way. Not a long time, and I saw and heard the two young wanderers pass by with music. A village was especially beautiful with humble dwellings set thickly under the white cliffs. I encountered a few carts, otherwise nothing, and I had seen some children on the highway. We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

—Robert Walser, “A Little Ramble”
Switzerland, 1914 (tr. TomWhelan)

Walser spent the last 23 years of his life in a sanatorium.