Walks with Walser

I bought ‘Walks With Walser’ as a gift to myself, a delicacy, a luxury, a memoir of my favorite writer. A sort of literary macaron. I was right and I was mistaken. Because this book is not just a postscript, not only a curiosity. It’s a wonderful book in its own right, and, if you love Robert Walser, it is a necessity, not a footnote.This is Carl Seelig’s memoir of his walks with Walser, while Walser lived at the asylum in Herisau. Seelig was his champion, literary executor and last friend. No small feat! As this book attests, Seelig took a lot of very arduous long walks in bad weather, with a hero who could be chatty or surly. Seelig’s literary heroism, along with that of Christopher Middleton, is a lot of the reason we still remember and rediscover Walser.In the 20 years that I’ve been reading Walser, I had a really silly, simplistic, fade-to-black view of his final years -- 27 of them -- in the asylum at Herisau. In my mind it was only a tragedy, just a loss. But of course that is nonsense, in view of Walser, his philosophy, and his writing.My favorite writer didn’t write for the last 27 years of his life. Turns out he spent many of his last days untangling and sorting twine at the post office. He clearly had no problem with that. Why should I?As a writer who also lives on the edge of society, I loved Seelig’s account most when it praised living simply, in obscurity, and rescued Walser’s words from oblivion, words that are both help and vindication, for example:"Wherever I've lived there have always been conspiracies to keep out vermin like myself. Anything that does not fit into one's world is always grandly and haughtily repelled. I never dared to push my way in. I wouldn't even have had the courage to take a peek into that world. And so I lived my own life on the periphery of bourgeois existence, and was that not a good thing? Does my world not also have the right to exist, even if it seems like a poorer world, a powerless world?"

This is a great little memoir about Robert Walser as told by his editor, Seelig, a quirky writer himself. Unfolds over a series of walks the two took in the Alps when Seelig visited Walser in an asylum there over many years. Some funny spots, some sad. Also, an interesting read for anyone interested in W.G. Sebald. I think Sebald learned a lot from Walser and from this book in particular. It has a similar structure to Sebald's books.

One of the most important, and certainly one of the most overlooked (by American readers), writers in this century. A significant influence on Kafka, to name just one.

Robert, "Rösti, fried eggs, beer, and pastries"

Very fine collection of insightful stories.

Most touching and intimate talks with one of the greatest and most special authors.One can learn a lot about Walser's life and about his modest personality.Carl Seelig has beautifully written and documented these walks and created a truly important and intriguing work for literature lovers and researchers.

A+

Walser lives! This memoir by his devotee Seelig is a good portrait of the man of determined innocence whose 'heartbreaking' (Susan Sontag) wayward novels, poems and scribbles are now as legendary as those of his Portuguese doppelganger, Pessoa. The 'walks' also are as much about the fantastic amount of food enjoyed en route as the gems that emerge from Walser's lips.