Frustrated at his inability to find a way to follow up the modest success of his three novels, Walser left Berlin in March 1913 and returned to Switzerland, to settle in Biel for the next few years. He continued to publish pieces in newspapers and magazines, and he even won a literary prize for the last of his collections published in Germany, Kleine Dichtungen (the money was trapped in a German bank account and wiped out by inflation before he was able to touch it), but the outbreak of war interrupted his relations with his German publishers. In 1916 he was approached independently by three different Swiss publishers looking to include him in their catalogue of home-grown authors, which resulted in the publication within a short space of time of the novella-length Der Spaziergang, and two collections of short pieces, the pamphlet Prosastücke and the book-length Kleine Prosa. These three are brought together in Vol.5 of the Suhrkamp complete works, but you might find other combinations in translations.

Der Spaziergang sets the tone for all the pieces in the book - superficially a very simple account of a stroll the narrator takes on a sunny day in the Swiss town where he lives. He comments on shops and people he passes, reflects on the weather and the scenery, talks about a couple of encounters that sound significant but don't seem to lead to anything, and describes a lunch he's been invited to and a few small errands he has reserved for the afternoon (posting a letter, a fitting with the tailor, an appointment at the town hall). It's all set up in a very modest, self-deprecating and ironic tone, but we soon realise that there's something else going on under the surface. The prose defies the apparently realistic context by looping away in grand, rhythmic structures that often take the reader's breath away. The conversations the narrator describes clearly aren't meant to be taken as realistic accounts of what he has said (or what anyone could get away with saying in real life), but rather what he wishes he could have said, or what he was thinking when he said whatever he did actually say. This creates an uneasy sense of disconnection, alienation, from the banal, ordinary events of life. Images and chance remarks keep reminding us that there's a horrific war going on just offstage. Although all the explicit references are to German Romanticism of the Brentano era, this is unmistakably the voice of modernism - you can't help reading Walser's strolling writer posting his letters, eating his lunch and worrying about his tailor as a contemporary (or precursor) of Bloom wandering through Dublin, Mrs Dalloway buying her flowers or Prufrock walking on the beach.

In the two collections of prose pieces - most of which slide between categories like essay, sketch, story, memoir and review in undefinable ways - there's a similar sense of disconnection between the writer and the world, and a slightly amused astonishment at how strange everything is. We read pieces that are about nothing but themselves and the language they are made of, pieces about great writers (Dickens is chastised for being so good at what he did that he discourages all others from even trying to write), about a sausage, about odd characters who reject social norms, about fairy-tale-like incidents, and very frequently about young writers with various different names (in one case three different names in the same story) who work in offices or factories, become domestic servants, or live in isolation and penury in the suburbs and try to write - all things that Walser had done at various points in his career. Fascinating and delightful! ( )