This is one of those books that I bought because I loved the beauty of the book as a physical object.  The cover (seen above) is a deep yellow. The text from the title to the author’s name to the information about the translation, thoughts from the artist Maira Kalman, and an afterward from Walter Benjamin’s 1927 work are all centered giving a feeling of symmetry and calm. Finally, Kalman’s painting of a package (assumed to be a manuscript) wrapped in a newspaper featuring the photo of Walser’s dead body in the snow, tied up with linen and a wax seal is strikingly beautiful.

I probably would have bought this book for those reasons alone having but a vague idea of who Walser was, but I had also been fascinated by W.G. Sebald’s writing about him in “A Place in the Country”.  Walser was Swiss, and he wrote in German.  Considered today to be one of the giants of 20th C. Modernism, his novels, short stories, and poems were largely neglected during his life outside of a circle of other writers including Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Herman Hesse, and Stephen Zweig.    Walser’s family had a long history of mental illness and suicide, and he spent the final 27 years of his life in a sanitorium with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.  He was found dead in the snow on Christmas day, 1956 having gone for a walk.

This volume collects 29 ‘stories’ that Walser wrote using what he described as his ‘pencil method’ in which he used a pencil to make extremely small letters on random pieces of paper that he repurposed and cut into various shapes.  The writing was originally felt to be some kind of code, until recent scholarship identified it as ‘radically miniaturized Kurrent’ script, a form of handwriting favored in German speaking countries until the mid-20th C.  The letters, less than 1 mm high, cannot be read as one would read a book, but have to be interpreted, almost translated,  to yield these microscripted stories.

The practice of using random pieces of paper, envelopes, etc for writing reminded me of Emily Dickenson’s poetry on similar paper collected in a lovely volume entitled “The Gorgeous Nothings”.  

The stories themselves are weird and weirder.  Most of them have no plot, no characters, and no clear intention.  Here’s an example from one entitled ‘My subject here is a victor’:  “Let me be thoughtful. I don’t wish to boast. May my words be dipped one by one in a bath of deliberation until the language flowing from my pen abounds with a black velvet profundity.”  There are 140 pages of what Benjamin describes as “a neglect of style that is quite extraordinary and that is also hard to define…. a chaotic scatteredness… linguistic wilderness.”

The best parts of the book are the informative introduction, the commentary by one of my favorites, Walter Benjamin, and the beautiful watercolors by Kalman that conclude the book.  Glad I read this fascinating curiosity but not sure I can recommend it.