The Robber (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780803298095)

The Robber, Robert Walser's last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby's mouth as an ashtray. Walser's novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview. Robert Walser (1878-1956), the Swiss-German master of high modernist prose, was once so well known that the novelist Robert Musil, reviewing Franz Kafka's first book of stories, described Kafka as "a special case of the Walser type." Susan Bernofsky is an assistant professor of German at Bard College and the translator of short prose by Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Gregor von Rezzori's Anecdotage.

Author: Robert Walser
ISBN-10: 0803298099
ISBN-13: 9780803298095
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 03/01/2000
Pages: 141
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.51h x 5.01w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/14/2000 pg. 176
Booklist 03/15/2000 pg. 1331