Bookbot

Robert Walser

    15 april 1878 – 25 december 1956

    Robert Walser, een Duitstalige Zwitserse prozaschrijver, wordt geprezen om zijn taalkundige verfijning en levendigheid. Zijn werk balanceert tussen een modernistische toewijding aan kunst en een voortdurend bevragen van de morele legitimiteit en praktische bruikbaarheid ervan. Walser onderzoekt de spanningen tussen stijlvolle uitbundigheid en peinzende melancholie, tussen natuur en cultuur, en tussen democratisch respect voor het individu en elitaire reacties op massicultuur.

    Robert Walser
    The Poems
    Selected Stories
    Running with the Devil
    Comedies
    De bediende
    Lebowski book of the month - 1: De wandeling
    • In De wandeling vlucht een schrijver weg van het lege vel papier voor hem, naar buiten. Hij wandelt door een kleine stad en door bos en open veld, opmerkzaam op elk detail. Zo nu en dan ontmoet hij iemand, zoals een boekhandelaar, een belastinginspecteur, een dame, een zingend meisje en een reusachtige man genaamd Tomtsjak. Aan het slot worden de randen van zijn gemoed steeds donkerder. De wandeling wordt wel gezien als een allegorie op het scheppingsproces, waarin schrijven een middel is om aan het leven te ontsnappen. Deze uitgave bevat ook het essay 'Le promeneur solitaire' van W.G. Sebald.

      Lebowski book of the month - 1: De wandeling
      3,6
    • De bediende

      • 266bladzijden
      • 10 uur lezen

      De bediende van een Zwitserse industriëel maakt de neergang mee van diens gezin en daarmee van de burgerlijke moraal waarin ook hijzelf geborgenheid dacht te vinden.

      De bediende
      3,7
    • Comedies

      • 294bladzijden
      • 11 uur lezen

      This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser's work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser's plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.

      Comedies
      4,5
    • Running with the Devil

      • 230bladzijden
      • 9 uur lezen

      A comprehensive musical, social, and cultural analysis of heavy metal music, with a new foreword and afterword

      Running with the Devil
      4,4
    • A collection of writings by Swiss author Robert Walser, including journal entries, stories, notes on literature, biographical sketches, fables, and anecdotes.

      Selected Stories
      4,2
    • The first complete publication of Robert Walser's poems translated into English. Admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin and acclaimed "unforgettable, heart-rending" by J. M. Coetzee, Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) remains one of the most influential authors of modern literature. Walser left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing poems, stories, essays, and novels. In 1933, he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad." This first collection of Walser's poems in English translation allows English-speaking readers to experience the author as he saw himself at the beginning and the end of his literary career--as a poet. The book also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions of the printed poems, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Walser has seen in recent years, and this collection of his poems will help readers discover a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era.

      The Poems
      3,8
    • Little Snow Landscape

      • 208bladzijden
      • 8 uur lezen

      A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century fiction. Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert Walser’s homeland and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published in the last of his four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern. Between these two poles, the book maps Walser’s outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes. Here you find him writing in the persona of a girl composing an essay on the seasons, of Don Juan at the moment he senses he’s outplayed his role, and of Turkey’s last sultan shortly after he’s deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with the heroine of the penny dreadful he’s reading (and she with him?), and the lady of a house catches her servant spread out on the divan casually reading a classic. Three longer autobiographical stories—“Wenzel,” “Würzburg,” and “Louise”—brace the whole. In addition to a representative offering of Walser’s short prose, of which he was one of literature’s most original, multifarious, and lucid practitioners, Little Snow Landscape forms a kind of novel, however apparently plotless, from the vast unfinishable one he was constantly writing.

      Little Snow Landscape
      3,9
    • Published in 1908, the novel is a notebook, a boy?s impressions of life at the school for servants run by the brother and sister Benjamenta. The lesson of the school is humility and the rejection of power and ambition. It is a lesson that the narrator, Jakob von Gunten, learns well. From his vantage point, he is able to see through the absurd posturings of his fellow students. Like his creation Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser understood of the attractions of infinitesimal smallness and kept well away from the corruptions and temptations of literary life. An outsider who spent his last twenty-seven years in an asylum, Walser was a writer?s writer whose work was much admired by Kafka, Hesse and Mann. His voice appeals to all those who savour silence in an epoch of deafening noise. Now a major feature film directed by the Quay Brothers, Institute Benjamenta is Walser?s masterpiece. Ninety years after its first publication, this edition offers the chance to read a truly extraordinary classic.

      Jakob von Gunten
      3,8
    • Feuer

      • 120bladzijden
      • 5 uur lezen

      Aufgrund der Intensivierung der Forschung über Robert Walser sind unbekannte Gedichte und bisher nicht eruierte Feuilletons entdeckt worden. Die über zwanzig Prosatexte zeigen, wie er in seinen Zeitungsfeuilletons den Raum "unter dem Strich" nutzte. Er wendet sich in ihnen der Gegenwart zu und distanziert sich zugleich von ihr

      Feuer
      4,7
    • Poetenleben

      • 139bladzijden
      • 5 uur lezen

      Robert Walsers Poetenleben ist eine Sammlung von 25 Kurzgeschichten, entlarvenden, doch mit schalkhafter Arglosigkeit vorgetragenen Episoden aus dem abenteuerlich unzeitgemäßen Alltag eines «Poeten».

      Poetenleben
      5,0