The Walk and Other Stories by Robert Walser – review

The Swiss bank clerk Robert Walser was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1933 and spent the last quarter of his life in an asylum. But he left a curiously brilliant and utterly original corpus of work, whose wry surrealism is reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and indeed John Lennon, given that the protagonist of his short masterpiece "Helbling's Story" imagines no possessions and goes to bed indefinitely. To get a flavour one need only consider some of the opening lines: "Once there was a man and on his shoulders he had, instead of a head, a hollow pumpkin"; "I am delighted to be addressing such a delicate subject as trousers." The whimsy can become a overpowering, though the neurotic monologues have the sense of being written with fingernails bitten to the quick: "I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes." Only Walser could conceive a story in the form of a job application, in which he admits to having no aptitude or abilities whatsoever; but as he attests elsewhere: "Nobody should be afraid of their little bit of weirdness."