Microscripts by Robert Walser; trans. by Susan Bernofsky

Microscripts is a lovely little book containing just twenty five (we wish there were more) short pieces written by author Robert Walser, one of the finest modernist writers of the twentieth century. Born in Switzerland in 1878, Walser wrote three novels early in his writing life, The Tanners, The Assistant, Jakob von Gunten and, a fourth, The Robber, much later. He is better known, though, for the short pieces he wrote, called feuilletons. Lighthearted and brief,  essays like these covered art, literature, and gossip in European newspapers up until the early twentieth century.  After World War I, however, feuilletons fell from favor and Walser had more and more trouble getting his writing published, ultimately spending the last twenty-three years of his life in a mental institution.

These short “prose pieces,” a couple only one paragraph long, most under 1000 words, describe common, unremarkable things in Walser’s life: hearing a radio for the first time, a train station, schnapps, autumn, a cabaret singer, and more. W. G. Sebald referred to Walser as “[a] clairvoyant of the small.” Walser’s writing is poignant, funny, imaginative, uncomplicated, and self-referential. As all outstanding writers do, he expresses a world familiar to most of his readers yet nuanced by his own uniqueness.

A particularly interesting essay begins:

Usually I first put on a prose piece jacket, a sort of writer’s smock, before venturing to begin with composition; but I’m in a rush right now, and besides, this is just a tiny little piece, a silly trifle featuring beer coasters round as plates.

But it is more than a “trifle.” Walser talks about watching some children and a dog tossing beer mats around, then segues into a beautiful woman named Rosalinde whose husband “was obliged to tidy up the rooms she rented out” while she sat outside and read newspapers. The husband was nameless. “It would not have been fitting for him to have a name – this namelessness made him happy and thus he was provided for.” Undoubtedly, Walser is also talking about himself; during his writing life, he shunned recognition and fame of any sort.

Another story that tells the reader more about Walser is one that could be called “The Sorrowful Man,” although it was untitled by Walser, as were most of his unpublished stories. Here, he says “The deprivation following him everywhere prompted the urge to distinguish himself to arise within him, and where entertainments were concerned, impressed on him the notion that life demanded he abjure them.” And then, “And so he befriended loneliness, which has been sought and desired by many whom loneliness did not consider worthy of notice.” In “The Prodigal Son” Walser writes, “people are looking my way as if they expect something from me, and as calmly as you please I allow them to brush me with their eyes, whose beams polish, plane, round, and flatten me.”

Despite an apparently sad and lonely life, Walser’s style is remarkable for it’s humor and jaunty tone.  One very short piece begins “What a nice writer I ran into not long ago,” Walser’s droll way of saying he was enjoying a book he was reading. Walser has a good sense of humor, exemplified in a piece called “Swine,” by “To me and several others it is clear that the willful confusion of the beautiful and the bestial is, in a manner of speaking, fun.” He is fond of playing with language; in a story called “Autumn,” he writes “. . . he finds himself encircled and en-ringed-around-the-rosied by children.” And, in “The Marriage Proposal,” “Yesterday I engaged a more uncomely than pulchritudinous member of the solicitude-requiring faction of the collectivity of humanity . . .”

Unfortunately, instead of focusing on the content of his stories, much of the current discussion about Walser centers on the unusual method of writing he developed over the years. After his death, hundreds of Walser’s stories were found that were written in tiny script on the reverse sides of used pieces of paper such as the backs of business cards, the reverse sides of calendar pages, and, because these stories were unreadable, they were thought to have been written in some sort of code.  (For the first time, a volume of Walser’s essays includes facsimiles of some of these microscripts.)  It turns out that Walser was writing in Kurrentschrift, an alphabet used in Germany in the 19^th century and whose characters  lend themselves easily to extremely compact writing.  Why Walser wrote this way is a matter of much speculation.

Walser’s short essays are beautiful snapshots of early 20th century European life that, at the same time, reveal much to the reader about the sad, difficult life of their author. “The Demanding Fellow” ends with the following sentences which sum up admirably the “one can’t win” feeling that permeates much of Walser’s writing.

“And yet for this individual who constantly longed for something out of the ordinary, the happiness he achieved was a sort of calamity, such that he gradually came to regret finding himself so abundantly satisfied.

All his longing, how he longed for it again”

Reviewed by Stan Izen

Microscripts by Robert Walser; trans. by Susan Bernofsky

New Directions, 2010
Cloth, 160 pp, $24.95
ISBN-13: 9780811218801