The Robber
Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky, Susan Bernofsky (Translator)Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
The Robber, Robert Walser’s last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby’s mouth as an ashtray. Walser’s novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview.Synopsis
The Robber, Robert Walser’s last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby’s mouth as an ashtray. Walser’s novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview.
John Ashbery
Those familiar with the work of Robert Walser, who led a life of obscurity, but whose admirers included Kafka, Hesse, Musil and Walter Benjamin, won't need to be prompted to procure his 1925 novel, The Robber...In the eupohoric, endlessly proliferating style typical of his work of the early 1920's, this "story of a dreamer on a voyage of self-discovery" is in marked contrast to the angst and mystery of his earlier novel, Jakob von Gunten.< br>—Times Literary Supplement
Editorials
John Ashbery
Those familiar with the work of Robert Walser, who led a life of obscurity, but whose admirers included Kafka, Hesse, Musil and Walter Benjamin, won't need to be prompted to procure his 1925 novel, The Robber...In the eupohoric, endlessly proliferating style typical of his work of the early 1920's, this "story of a dreamer on a voyage of self-discovery" is in marked contrast to the angst and mystery of his earlier novel, Jakob von Gunten.< br>—Times Literary SupplementBooklist
“It's the sharp observation of the mundane details of daily existence in a smallish European city after World War I that helps keep the reader grounded. The narrative twists and leaps, along with asides bout the writing process, give the book a hectic energy.”—BooklistNew York Review of Books
"[The Robber's] charm lies in its surprising twists and turns of direction, its delicately ironic handling of the formulas of amatory play, and its supple and inventive exploitation of the resources of German. . . . Susan Bernofsky rises splendidly to the challenge of late Walser, particularly his play with the compound formations to which German is so hospitable. . . . The Robber is more or less contemporary in composition with Joyce's Ulysses and with the later volumes of Proust's Rechere. Had it been published in 1926 it might have affected the course of modern German literature, opening up and even legitimating as a subject the adventures of the writing (or dreaming) self and the meandering line of ink (or pencil) that emerges under the writing hand."—J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
— J. M. Coetzee