Robert Walser: Uncanny Miniaturist On The Move.

To Seelig's absorbing apocrypha we can now add the first English biography of Walser, Susan Bernofsky's superb I Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser i . But it was mental healthcare that took a toll on Walser, and by then German publishers, decimated by the Nazi dictatorship, had lost one of his novels, while Walser destroyed another. When W. G. Sebald, who wrote the appreciation of Walser from which Bernofsky takes her title, wrote out his Suffolk walking excursion as I The Rings of Saturn i ( I Die Ringe des Saturns i ), he was extending Walser's featherlight excursus into a leaden tome. Though Robert Musil declared Franz Kafka to be "a special case of the Walser type", it is Robert Walser who still gets justified as a special case of the Kafka type. [Extracted from the article]