I have had a very busy week and have been suffering mild literary withdrawal symptoms due to the demands of visitors preventing me from updating A Common Reader for the last few days, or even responding properly to those who have commented on my reviews - apologies to those.
However, I've managed to snatch some reading time and have enjoyed reading The Tanners by Robert Walser. The only other book I've read by Walser is The Assistant, which I enjoyed greatly so I came to this newly published edition of The Tanners with a sense of anticipation.
Swiss writer Robert Walser wrote during the first part of the 20th century, and was a unique writer and as his Wikipedia entry says, "A characteristic of Walser's texts is a playful serenity behind which hide existential fears. Today, Walser's texts, completely re-edited since the 1970s, are regarded as among the most important writings of literary modernism". Walser led an outwardly limited life, never marrying and ending his years in an asylum. He died while out for a long lonely walk in the snow
Robert Walser is an important writer for those with an interest in this period and in writers who followed in his wake such as W G Sebald. Sebald in fact provides a critical biography of Walser in his 36 page introduction to this edition of The Tanners which is worth the purchase price in itself, beginning with the words,
The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. . . he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways.
