Status
Available
Genres
Publication
New York : New Directions, 2012.
Description
A pseudo-biographical "stroll" through town and countryside rife with philosophical musings,The Walk has been hailed as the masterpiece of Walser's short prose. Walking features heavily in his writing, but nowhere else is it as elegantly considered. Without walking, "I would be dead," Walser explains, "and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed. Because it is on walks that the lore of nature and the lore of the country are revealed, charming and graceful, to the sense and eyes of the observant walker."The Walk was the first piece of Walser's work to appear in English, and the only one translated before his death. However, Walser heavily revised his most famous novella, altering nearly every sentence, rendering the baroque tone of his tale into something more spare. An introduction by translator Susan Bernofsky explains the history ofThe Walk, and the differences between its two versions.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member jonfaith
Think of Knut Hamsun. Now think of him drinking and being a pacifist. The Walk explores modernity's challenges to a quiet life. The bookseller, the tax office and the tailor are among the riptides encountered by our humble man of letters, out to fill his lungs and prime his mind for poetic
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fomentation. There is an ache among the laughter. The rumble of not-so-distant war perists. Students are thrashed by zealous teachers. Our protagonist carries unrequited love in his breast and eventually ponders madness and suicide. Show Less
LibraryThing member MSarki
This is a superb book and very much fun to read. I was surprised at how similar the new Bernofsky translation was to the original Middleton. Upon receiving the book in the mail I discovered that she left much of what Middleton did intact. And there is nothing wrong with that at all. She explains
I think, eventually, I will need to write something more about this short book. As many other "new" writers attempt to use walking as novel exercise, it is important to note that this concept is not novel, but has been done skillfully many times already throughout the past. Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, and Max Sebald are three writers who come immediately to mind. Still, there is nothing so pleasing as a good walking tale. But that is where the trouble starts. All these accounts are not all interesting. And some are too staged, too propped, and too made-up. I am reading one now having been translated from the Spanish. The beginning was promising but has since fallen into a pretentious and disjointed mass of drivel. But it has been blessed by certain important others and so it is enjoying no little success. But there is not much in it that rings true. In contrast, this book, The Walk, by Walser must be true. There is hardly anything I have read by Walser that isn't. Or hard pressed to prove otherwise. Unless Walser is describing some love conquest he had over some gorgeous woman, which the thought of it being so ludicrous it is funny.
More needs to be said about this fine work, newly translated by Susan Bernofsky who always does justice to his work. In the meantime, there will be others who attempt to emulate him and it is I who wishes them success. I just don't want to be lied to.
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the changes she made to the text in her introduction which is quite helpful. I think, eventually, I will need to write something more about this short book. As many other "new" writers attempt to use walking as novel exercise, it is important to note that this concept is not novel, but has been done skillfully many times already throughout the past. Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, and Max Sebald are three writers who come immediately to mind. Still, there is nothing so pleasing as a good walking tale. But that is where the trouble starts. All these accounts are not all interesting. And some are too staged, too propped, and too made-up. I am reading one now having been translated from the Spanish. The beginning was promising but has since fallen into a pretentious and disjointed mass of drivel. But it has been blessed by certain important others and so it is enjoying no little success. But there is not much in it that rings true. In contrast, this book, The Walk, by Walser must be true. There is hardly anything I have read by Walser that isn't. Or hard pressed to prove otherwise. Unless Walser is describing some love conquest he had over some gorgeous woman, which the thought of it being so ludicrous it is funny.
More needs to be said about this fine work, newly translated by Susan Bernofsky who always does justice to his work. In the meantime, there will be others who attempt to emulate him and it is I who wishes them success. I just don't want to be lied to.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jon1lambert
Read in one go immediately after buying it - a great example of 'flaneur' literature. Off he went, hat on head, with tasks to do, one by one, observing, sounding off and analysing all the way. Walser has no truck with speed and innovation. He would certainly struggle today - at least he managed to
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see a bank manager and not a computer. Show Less
LibraryThing member stillatim
A wonderful little volume--short, with a fun translator back story (first translated by Middleton, but Walser re-wrote it, and Bernofsky has translated that re-write... and written an introduction about how great Middleton is, and Walser is, and it's all just very affirmative. Let me add, then,
I'm also fairly bored with books telling me, over 900 pages, to just appreciate the fleeting and everyday, whereas that thought really does make sense when the book in question is, itself, fleeting, and also includes the recognition that "I consider a constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature."
The narrator is a wondrous creation, and I would love to spend my evenings with him. Instead, I will spend more evenings with Walser.
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that Bernofsky's update of Middleton's 'Walk' is wonderfully readable). And 'The Walk' itself is a wonder. I'm well and truly sick of books that appear to understated and calm and then end with BUT HE WAS A RAPIST or CHILD SEX MURDER SLAVE or something similar. The Walk, however, is just understated. I'm also fairly bored with books telling me, over 900 pages, to just appreciate the fleeting and everyday, whereas that thought really does make sense when the book in question is, itself, fleeting, and also includes the recognition that "I consider a constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature."
The narrator is a wondrous creation, and I would love to spend my evenings with him. Instead, I will spend more evenings with Walser.
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LibraryThing member proustitute
... the inward self is the only self which really exists.Walser's The Walk is anything but a light, jolly stroll: it's a trek uphill through spiraling landscapes, before the reader realizes that Walser has begun an abrupt, downward descent. The closing pages of The Walk are utterly
This is a novella about everything and nothing. The narrator, a writer, leaves his "writing room, or room of phantoms" to take a walk through the town and the countryside. Along the way, he meets many different people from various walks of life: a postal worker; a tailor; a bookseller; a young woman singing; dogs; children; "the giant" Tomzack; a woman with whom he dines; and several others. It's no wonder that W. G. Sebald has called Walser "a clairvoyant of the small" as each of these interactions—and the bizarre, often archaic, speech acts we witness (e.g., after seeing a sign for lodgings, the narrator goes on for three pages to give the reader the sign's strange subtext)—tells us more about both the narrator's psychological state of mind as well as the world in which he feels so displaced.
In many ways, The Walk can be read as a parable of a changing world where natural scenes are giving way to increasingly industrialized ones; it can also be read as a commentary on how insular a writer's world is, and how the sense of sequestration and loneliness carry over into social interactions and also inform prejudices rooted in aesthetic judgments rather than firsthand observations. One can see how Walser's prose is indebted to pastoral influence of the nineteenth century while also forging new ground stylistically in his modernist musings, causing a strange chorus of dissonant tones to run throughout The Walk—a dissonance that works quite well here, if the reader is patient, knowing he or she is in masterful hands. As Walser's narrator/alter ego exlaims here: "I am a solid technician!" And so he is.
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heart-rending.This is a novella about everything and nothing. The narrator, a writer, leaves his "writing room, or room of phantoms" to take a walk through the town and the countryside. Along the way, he meets many different people from various walks of life: a postal worker; a tailor; a bookseller; a young woman singing; dogs; children; "the giant" Tomzack; a woman with whom he dines; and several others. It's no wonder that W. G. Sebald has called Walser "a clairvoyant of the small" as each of these interactions—and the bizarre, often archaic, speech acts we witness (e.g., after seeing a sign for lodgings, the narrator goes on for three pages to give the reader the sign's strange subtext)—tells us more about both the narrator's psychological state of mind as well as the world in which he feels so displaced.
In many ways, The Walk can be read as a parable of a changing world where natural scenes are giving way to increasingly industrialized ones; it can also be read as a commentary on how insular a writer's world is, and how the sense of sequestration and loneliness carry over into social interactions and also inform prejudices rooted in aesthetic judgments rather than firsthand observations. One can see how Walser's prose is indebted to pastoral influence of the nineteenth century while also forging new ground stylistically in his modernist musings, causing a strange chorus of dissonant tones to run throughout The Walk—a dissonance that works quite well here, if the reader is patient, knowing he or she is in masterful hands. As Walser's narrator/alter ego exlaims here: "I am a solid technician!" And so he is.
Show Less
Language
Original language
German