A review by jimmylorunning
Microscripts by Robert Walser

4.0

Assuming I do not lie, she wept with joy, although quite possibly she did so for some other reason.

("Assuming I do not lie" is the best clause to start off any sentence)

Obviously, this work has hip-appeal and almost Herzog-like marketability with its back-story. In case you haven't heard it yet: Walser spent many of his waning years writing in a kind of tiny hieroglyphic code that only he understood on the back of slips, envelopes, napkins, strips of paper, and whatnot. It took them 35 years to decode (and they still haven't decoded them all), and the contents of this book is the result of those snippets translated PLUS beautiful facsimiles of the original pieces of paper each story was written on.

The actual pieces are dizzying in the way they twist about. It is hard enough to follow one sentence of his, much less a whole sketch, which moves quickly from topic to topic. There is a sense that he tossed these off without much thought, although this casualness is coupled with his typical ornate overblown formality of style to a very strange effect. I find these pieces generally much more complicated and dense (on the sentence-level) than his early novels like [b:The Assistant|335333|The Assistant (New Directions Paperbook)|Robert Walser|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173843242s/335333.jpg|3120198], there is a sense of over-crowdedness here.

The casual manner in which I loved my beloved, who was forever distinguishing herself by her utter absence, resembled a soft-swelling, enchanting sofa.

Walter Benjamin writes an afterword to this book, and it has some great insights which I will now share with you. Exhibit 1.

For we can set our minds at rest by realizing that to write yet never correct what has been written implies both the absence of intention and the most fully considered intentionality

Exhibit 2.

Everything seems to be on the verge of disaster; a torrent of words pours from him in which the only point of every sentence is to make the reader forget the previous one.

Exhibit3.

The tears they shed are his prose. For sobbing is the melody of Walser's loquaciousness. It reveals to us where his favorite characters come from--namely, from insanity and nowhere else. They are figures who have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality.