Ridiculous; sublime; verbose. Whitmanian, with added melancholia.

Spontaneously I exclaimed, "Pretty indignant, by God, should one be, when brought face to face with such golden inscriptional barbarities, which impress upon our rustic surrounds the seal of greed, moneygrubbing, and a miserable coarsening of the soul. Does a master baker really require to appear so huge, with his foolish proclamations, to beam forth and glitter, like a dressy, dubious lady? Let him bake and knead his bread in honest, reasonable modesty. What sort of vertiginous conditions are we beginning to live in, when the municipality, the neighbors, officials, and public opinion not only tolerate but unhappily, it is clear, even applaud that which injures every sense of good office, every sense of beauty and probity, that which is morbidly puffed up, thinks it must offer a ridiculous, miserable, tawdry show of itself screaming out over a hundred yards' distance into the good air: 'Such and such am I. I have so and so much money, and I dare to make an unpleasant impression. Of course I am a bumpkin, a blockhead with my hideous ostentation, a taste-deficient fellow. But there will scarcely be anyone to forbid me to be blockheaded.'

He was offended, dear reader, by the presence of gold lettering in a bakery's shop window.

The earth became a dream; I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world. Everything outside me faded to obscurity, and all I had understood till now was unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also.

Is not all music, even the most niggardly, beautiful to the person who loves the very being and existence of music? Is not almost any human being you please - even the worst and most unpleasant - lovable to the person who is a friend to man?

( )

... 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 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. ( )

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, 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. ( )

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 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. ( )

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 see a bank manager and not a computer.