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Robert Walser

    15 avril 1878 – 25 décembre 1956

    Robert Walser, écrivain suisse de langue allemande, est célébré pour sa sophistication linguistique et sa vivacité. Son œuvre navigue la tension entre une dévotion moderniste à l'art et une remise en question persistante de sa légitimité morale et de son utilité pratique. Walser explore les contrastes entre un style exubérant et la mélancolie réflexive, les exigences de la nature face à la culture, et le respect démocratique de l'individualité face aux réactions élitistes à la culture de masse.

    Robert Walser
    Selected Stories
    Running with the Devil
    Comedies
    L'homme qui ne remarquait rien
    Retour dans la neige
    Le brigand
    • Le brigand

      • 235pages
      • 9 heures de lecture

      Retrouvé dans les manuscrits difficilement déchiffrables (les " microgrammes ") laissés par l'auteur, ce " roman " écrit en quelques semaines pendant l'été 1925 résume tout l'art et toute la personnalité de Walser. Le " brigand " qui en est le héros n'est autre que l'auteur lui-même, ce marginal inoffensif sévèrement jugé par la société, et qu'un narrateur faussement naïf tente de voir de l'extérieur. Les amateurs de ses autres romans (Le commis, Les enfants Tanner, L'Institut Benjamenta), comme ceux de La promenade ou de La rose, adoreront ce roman qui refuse d'en être un, et qui est sans doute la plus belle réussite de Robert Walser.

      Le brigand
      4,3
    • Un voyage en tramway, une escapade à la campagne, un hall de gare ou une rêverie dans les rues de Berlin : Robert Walser, flâneur d’exception, nous emmène dans un univers poétique et nostalgique, à la lisière du merveilleux. Chacun de ces textes, parus en feuilletons entre 1899 et 1920, possède une grâce particulière, dévoilant la profondeur des choses qui se cache « à la surface ».

      Retour dans la neige
      3,5
    • " Jadis ou naguère vivait un homme qui ne remarquait rien " : ainsi commence l'histoire de Monsieur Tartempion. Un texte inédit en français du grand écrivain suisse Robert Walser qui conduit le lecteur avec humour dans le monde de l'absurde.

      L'homme qui ne remarquait rien
    • This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser's work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser's plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.

      Comedies
      4,5
    • Running with the Devil

      • 230pages
      • 9 heures de lecture

      A comprehensive musical, social, and cultural analysis of heavy metal music, with a new foreword and afterword

      Running with the Devil
      4,4
    • A collection of writings by Swiss author Robert Walser, including journal entries, stories, notes on literature, biographical sketches, fables, and anecdotes.

      Selected Stories
      4,2
    • The first complete publication of Robert Walser's poems translated into English. Admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin and acclaimed "unforgettable, heart-rending" by J. M. Coetzee, Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) remains one of the most influential authors of modern literature. Walser left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing poems, stories, essays, and novels. In 1933, he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad." This first collection of Walser's poems in English translation allows English-speaking readers to experience the author as he saw himself at the beginning and the end of his literary career--as a poet. The book also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions of the printed poems, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Walser has seen in recent years, and this collection of his poems will help readers discover a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era.

      The Poems
      3,8
    • Published in 1908, the novel is a notebook, a boy?s impressions of life at the school for servants run by the brother and sister Benjamenta. The lesson of the school is humility and the rejection of power and ambition. It is a lesson that the narrator, Jakob von Gunten, learns well. From his vantage point, he is able to see through the absurd posturings of his fellow students. Like his creation Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser understood of the attractions of infinitesimal smallness and kept well away from the corruptions and temptations of literary life. An outsider who spent his last twenty-seven years in an asylum, Walser was a writer?s writer whose work was much admired by Kafka, Hesse and Mann. His voice appeals to all those who savour silence in an epoch of deafening noise. Now a major feature film directed by the Quay Brothers, Institute Benjamenta is Walser?s masterpiece. Ninety years after its first publication, this edition offers the chance to read a truly extraordinary classic.

      Jakob von Gunten
      3,8
    • Little Snow Landscape

      • 208pages
      • 8 heures de lecture

      A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century fiction. Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert Walser’s homeland and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published in the last of his four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern. Between these two poles, the book maps Walser’s outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes. Here you find him writing in the persona of a girl composing an essay on the seasons, of Don Juan at the moment he senses he’s outplayed his role, and of Turkey’s last sultan shortly after he’s deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with the heroine of the penny dreadful he’s reading (and she with him?), and the lady of a house catches her servant spread out on the divan casually reading a classic. Three longer autobiographical stories—“Wenzel,” “Würzburg,” and “Louise”—brace the whole. In addition to a representative offering of Walser’s short prose, of which he was one of literature’s most original, multifarious, and lucid practitioners, Little Snow Landscape forms a kind of novel, however apparently plotless, from the vast unfinishable one he was constantly writing.

      Little Snow Landscape
    • Feuer

      • 120pages
      • 5 heures de lecture

      Aufgrund der Intensivierung der Forschung über Robert Walser sind unbekannte Gedichte und bisher nicht eruierte Feuilletons entdeckt worden. Die über zwanzig Prosatexte zeigen, wie er in seinen Zeitungsfeuilletons den Raum "unter dem Strich" nutzte. Er wendet sich in ihnen der Gegenwart zu und distanziert sich zugleich von ihr

      Feuer
      4,7