A Forest Ten Feet Wide

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

“Don’t laugh at Tokyo,” my husband says.  But I wasn’t laughing.  That sound I made just now was the involuntary squeak that accompanies the truth when it abruptly comes into view.  When it passes through me suddenly, like a chill.

We are walking through the forest from Ookayama to Jiyugaoka.  This is Tokyo.  The forest is ten feet wide.  Let’s be specific.  The concrete path is four feet wide.  Then there three feet on either side for trees.  Some of the trees are hundreds of years old.  The path is interrupted, every fifteen feet or so, by curved aluminum barriers, so that bicyclists must dismount.  It’s a highly managed forest, you might say.  It is the forest of Tokyo.

Look at these trees.  Some of them are really tremendously old.  What was this place before?  It is impossible to imagine now, but I remember hearing Donald Richie insist that this was once one of the most beautiful places in the world.      

The Party of the Visible World

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

As my husband and I walked together, in Tokyo, through a forest ten feet wide, we passed Midorigaoka station.  A young man with a prominent mole on his chin was giving  a speech on the dangers of nuclear power.  Not one of the commuters hurrying in and out of the station even glanced at him.  Two fellow organizers struggled to hand out leaflets.  I took one.  I read: The Communist Party of Japan. 

I admit that I had no idea it still existed.  I asked my husband, “In this day and age, how does a young person end up running for office in the Communist Party?”

My husband explained, “His grandfather was very important in the party.  His father was important, too.  Now it is his turn.”

If the world we live in was decided by a vote, like a presidential candidate or celebrity contestant, the ordinary visible world would not even be one of the main contenders.  The ordinary visible world would be, at best, a dark horse candidate.  Only a few radicals would be in favor of it.  They would all be looked down upon and called reactionaries. 

The main candidates might be perhaps the phone world and the shopping world, with strong showings by meat world, sex world and pharma-world. 

But of course the worlds would not actually be called that – it would all be brand names and genius marketing.  Voters would check the box beside Monsanto Pleasure Pavilion and iPhone Paradise Access.  Further down the ballot would be the Good Times with Coors party and the XTube Triple-X Personal Freedom party.  Just imagine the delights and the gadgets, the distractions and gimmicks.  You need not imagine very hard.  How easily you might forget that there was any world but theirs. . .

Meanwhile the party of the ordinary visible world would just stand around pointing at things.  No PowerPoint, no laser pointers, just pointing with their actual fingers.  And pointing at what?  Not much that’s appealing.  It’s not like we live in a garden, here in Tokyo.  Asphalt and electric wires, convenience stores, pachinko – and you’re likely to get your toes run over if you stand around staring too long.  The ordinary visible world does not need to be lovely in Tokyo.  I mean, seriously -- who looks at it?

Who are those unpleasant and awkward people, the members of the party of the ordinary visible world?  Musty old hippies by the look of them, old apple pickers who can’t even get up their ladders anymore, unseemly outdated liberal academics who joined after the Actual Book party’s unseemly collapse.  The party of the visible world, or “reality fundamentalists”, as they would swiftly be dubbed, extremists in favor of experiencing the world without multiple apps, magic glasses and pharmaceutical enhancements.

The party of the ordinary visible world would be held in complete disdain.  The other parties would be united against it.  Almost everyone would agree: those people are nothing but partisans of an unimproved world, Luddite extremists in favor of a world we’ve left far behind, despite the fact we happen to go on standing in it, in our ishoes.

The party of the ordinary visible world would be as unpopular as anything else that makes people uncomfortable.  Indeed, that is the essential promise of all the other parties: we will make you comfortable.  And what kind of masochistic freak doesn’t want to be comfortable?  The Communist Party would be popular, in comparison to the party of the ordinary visible world.  Hell, climate change would be popular in comparison. . .

“It’s just another kind of prejudice,” people will say.  Racism, sexism, realism.  Eventually it will be a highly offensive term.  “How dare you accuse me of being a realist!”

This run-down scuffed and sullied world.  Concrete, wires, and smog.  The lines are long.  The weather is inconvenient.  No birds but crows.  Who wants this world? 

Excuse me.  I am only playing make-believe.  None of this is the case.  The world is not decided by a vote.  Not by my vote and not by yours.  Not even by a trillion votes of inattention, of turning away. 

Even without care, the ordinary world languishes but does not disappear.  Even as it goes on losing, the ordinary visible world cannot lose.  It is the only contender. 

No matter how long you stare into your phone, you remain standing here, in the ordinary visible world, as a storm nears, as the first drops land on the back of your bent neck, and still you do not look up.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Marie Redonnet

Marie Redonnet, Hôtel Splendid
University of Nevada Press, 1994
European Women Writers Series
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

Life is always evolving, society is forever progressing and we are all getting better and better in every way -- claim certain religious types and all advertising men. But, as you may have noticed, it sure as hell doesn't feel that way and that is where Marie Redonnet steps in, as Beckett did, to give us a taste of what life actually feels like: a hotel on the edge of swamp with one sister who is perpetually ill and another who dreams uselessly of being an actress. Life keeps looping around and the toilets never remain unblocked for long. We firmly intend to give up and somehow we don't get around to it.

In Hôtel Splendid, things getting slightly better is always a set-up for things getting significantly worse. Redonnet's staccato sentences, usually 5 to 10 words long, pile up like problems or bills to be paid and patter like rain on the roof. It is very likely that this elegant French novella contains more blocked lavatories than any in the history of literature.

This book is nothing but problems one after another and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it more than anything else I've read all year. It is absolutely transfixing. I laughed out loud so many times and I cannot provide a single example because you have to read it and fall into its strange rhythm and world until reading the words "The head foreman was bitten right in the calf by a rat" provokes you to laughter in spite of yourself.

Here's one taste. (Redonnet works in blocks of text approximately three to six pages long without paragraph breaks.) From page 17: "The swamp deserves more attention. It is a real nature preserve. There is always more of it to explore. Ada seems to be convalescing. The empty hotel is good for her. Even though she has always hated the swamp, she asked me to take her there for a walk. I was sure the swamp would do her good. That is the first time Ada has asked to go out. But she was disappointed by her walk. She couldn't bear the odor of the swamp. She thought it was always the same, no matter which way you turned. She couldn't stop shivering, in spite of the blanket she was wrapped in. When we got back, she went right to bed. She had a high fever. I had to give her a hot-water bottle. It did not warm her at all. She says her limbs are like lead. She blames the swamp for her relapse. She will never go back there again. The walk was not a success."

I discovered this book by reading Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2013, which contained some lively stories and some pretentious ones but nothing that compared to the story "Madame Zabee's Guesthouse" by Marie Redonnet. Searching online, I found three short novels (Hôtel Splendid is the first) translated almost twenty years ago and another translated ten years later. (There is also a collection of short stories, now so rare a copy of it will cost you five hundred dollars!) Reading Hotel Splendid made me hope that new work will soon be available, including a collection of short fictions. Redonnet's work is weirdly irresistible, like an unsettling dream you can't stop dreaming.

My Career

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo 2013)

At last I have settled on a career.  People who know me are sure to be relieved.  Everyone must find a path through the world.  As for me, I am going to be a Japanese society lady.  Naturally it’s not the career path I intended.  Not originally.  It’s not what I went to school for.  At least it’s not what I thought I was in school for, back when I was in school.  Just the same, I’m qualified. 

I have proven that I can spend time in cafes every day.  I have demonstrated this time and again.  Can I obsessively scrutinize my appearance?  Yes, I can.  My nature is already very highly reserved.  I am innately discreet.  While I do not attend movies, I do like to read.  Heavy reading, though by no means required, is at least permitted, the titles discretely shielded by white linen book covers.

I will be my husband’s ornament, his jewel.  I will be beautiful or invisible, as the situation requires.  When my husband comes home exhausted, late at night, I will present his slippers, stir his miso, grace his table.  I will be the fluorescent light of his life.  All he need ever give me in return is a tremendous amount of money.

I warn my husband that my career will be intensely demanding.  Although there are aspects which may appear pleasant – the Dior uniforms, the chitchat, the brunches – there are other aspects which are highly exacting: to eat continually and never gain an ounce, to persist in permanent youth.  Not for nothing do society ladies almost inevitably require heavy-duty psychotropic medications and extensive plastic surgery.  Counseling certainly.  Exotic vacations unquestionably.

I will be a Japanese society lady seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.  Even in my sleep I must aim to dream of Audrey Hepburn, her hands folded in her lap, her expression pleasant, sitting on a white sofa on a white carpet in a room with white walls.

It’s a JOB, I tell my husband.  I can’t just choose the parts I like.  It’s true that I have options.  I have exactly two options.  A set is one option.  The other option is B set.

A set: I will need a dog, a teeny-tiny dog, an adorable itsy-bitsy dog, vicious and prone to ailments.  I will buy my little dog suits and boots and raincoats.  I will treasure my dog above all, I will kiss him, clutch him to my chest, and cry when he sneezes.  Oh my little itsy-bitsy precious puppy dog, my baby, fragile as a blown-out egg and fierce as an  attorney.

My husband says he does not wish to have a dog.  Especially not a little yippy-yappy nasty dog.  In fact, he refuses.  Absolutely not, he says.  And that is OK.  That’s all right.  There is still another option.

B set: I must have long, doomed, drawn-out, hopeless, squalid, sordid affairs.

It’s that or a little dog.

Just Interesting

Tokyo, 2013

It sounds odd to call Taro my student, since he was eighty-seven when he died and  already over eighty when he started coming to my English class.  He was old enough to have been a soldier in World War Two – a very young, near-sighted, and perhaps slightly eccentric one. 

I can report that although Taro’s English was slow and halting, he didn’t make many mistakes and he could say what he wanted to say.  He did not, however, participate in discussions.  While the other students related their ailments, holidays and grandchildren, Taro sat still as a statue, without seeming to move even his eyes, so becalmed you could be excused for thinking that he’d maybe gone a little soft in the head.

Each week, when the discussion had slowed down a little, or when I saw that class would soon be over, I’d turn to Taro and ask, “So, Taro, any news?”

If it sounds like I wasn’t a very good English teacher, that’s the truth.  I was lazy.  I was too tired and too busy, like the rest of the population of Tokyo.  On the plus side, I was not very important.  A focused and energetic English lesson -- would only have gotten in the way.  I was just an excuse.  I was just an excuse and I knew it.  The English language was just an excuse.

There we were, in Tokyo.  Tokyo is the number one loneliest city in the world.  I’ll arm-wrestle anyone who says otherwise.  But these old people weren’t lonely.  They were having a good time and, if their grown grandchildren sometimes laughed because grandma was taking English lessons, and maybe had been taking English lessons since almost the Occupation, even though her English never improved much and she continued to say I go to shopping despite being corrected three times every Wednesday, still, I’m telling you, these old people were very clever, they knew a thing or two about living.

Just because some people remain immune to wisdom all their lives does not mean that wisdom can be ruled out.  Some people do become wise in their old age and some of those people, it turns out, go to English class, even when they are eighty-five years old.

Whenever I called on Taro his magnified eyes would blink behind the heavy lenses of his  glasses and he’d rub his lips together to moisten them.  Then he would open his spiral notebook and cough to clear his throat.  Using his notes to assist him – there were always a few words he’d needed to look up – he would tell the class a story.

In my life so far, Taro is my favorite storyteller.  If I tell you one of his stories, you will be disappointed and you will think that I am not a good writer.  That is the truth, but I know, too, that I am not very important and that counts as a skill nowadays.

For example, the story of when Taro went to Paris with his wife.  They went to celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary.  I’m not sure, it may even have been their 60^th.

“Wonderful, Taro!  How romantic!  What did you and your wife do in Paris?”

Taro explained that it was raining in Paris and they did not feel very energetic.  The chambermaid was a single mother raising two children on her own.  She taught Taro and his wife to count to ten in French.

“That’s great, Taro!  And what did you do in Paris!”

At that point Taro nodded to the other students.  They all smiled broadly to each other.  I think it actually pleased them that their American teacher understood nothing whatsoever about life. 

It was a long time before I understood that. . . nothing special needed to happen.  Taro and his wife went to Paris to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.  It was raining and they didn’t feel well.  They stayed in the hotel and the friendly chambermaid taught them to count to ten in French.  That was it.  And that was enough.

Or the time Taro found a dead cat on his roof.  A cat corpse saturated in cooking oil.  Taro’s wife thought she smelled something, Taro got on his ladder and, sure enough, there was a large dead oil-soaked cat on the roof.  There were a lot of restaurants around where he lived.  They poured used cooking oil into a barrel, but they didn’t always put a lid over it.  The cat must have been lured by the smell and fallen in, then been overwhelmed when it tried to clean itself.

“Oh, Taro!  I am so sorry!  That’s terrible!  That’s disgusting!” 

For that matter, what the hell was an eighty-five year old man doing on a ladder?

Again, Taro looked to his classmates.  Again, the knowing smiles and nods.  Like I said, I think they really appreciated the fact that I could be relied upon to be dumb and insensitive.

The point was not that the cat was disgusting – it was all just interesting.  Whether it was a dead cat on the roof or learning to count to ten in French, here was reality, and Taro attended to it.

Nothing bad ever happened to Taro.  I was his teacher for years and I can attest to the fact.  Nothing good happened either.  Everything was just interesting.  Whatever it was, he took care of it, and wrote an account in his notebook, always with a few new words which he forgot almost as soon as he looked up from the page.

What a very interesting world it was.  For example, it was interesting that he was constantly being arrested by the police.  As a young man he’d never been arrested, not even once.  Now he got arrested all the time. 

This was because of his bicycle.  He liked his bicycle very much, although it was just the ordinary heavy kind of bicycle which Japanese use to get back and forth from the grocery store.  He had built it himself, from the parts of many different discarded bicycles, and it was several different colors.

In Tokyo, when something breaks, you get a new one.  Even if just one small part is broken, you get a new one.  It is not usual to fix something, much less to make something from what others have discarded.

The police took one look at Taro’s multi-colored bicycle and assumed that he had stolen it, part by part.  They put him in the squad car, drove him to the station, and accused him of being a bicycle thief.  It took him a long time to convince him that he was just someone who liked to fix things.

This happened multiple times.  It happened so often that the police chief, the moment he saw Taro, would rush over and start apologizing.  The chief would apologize profusely, then lay into the patrol cop for having nothing better to do than accuse an octogenarian of stealing a bicycle.

The truth was, Taro didn’t mind.  He didn’t mind being arrested any more than he minded finding a dead cat on the roof or traveling to Paris.  He was not at all displeased.  He was not neutral either and certainly he was not unfeeling.

Taro lived to be 87.  He was an art teacher and a painter.  His canvases were abstract and enormous and people who saw them invariably said that they seemed like the work of a much younger man.

Taro was the best storyteller I have ever known.  His life was ordinary and also uncommonly rich.  He was the kind of person who finds everything interesting.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Giedra Radvilavičiūtė

Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, 
Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas

Lithuanian Literature Series
Dalkey Archive Press, 2013





Giedra Radvilavičiūtė isn’t well-known in English and that’s a shame because this is a marvelous book and I can imagine many people loving it, if only they could discover it.  These are stories in the form of essays, or fictional essays – it doesn’t matter what you call them, you’ll catch the drift at once, I promise.  (The people who used to be obsessed with classifying genre appear to have finally exhausted themselves, thank God.)

These stories have the suppleness of stream of consciousness – and a sense of precision suitable for a legal secretary.  What sort of reader will be fond of this book?  Off the top of my head: fans of W.G. Sebald or Julio Cortazar or Lydia Davis.  Actually, I predict that there are fans of Lydia Davis who will like Radvilavičiūtė even better.  She has what I think of as “the Jane Bowles gift” – there’s no guessing what sentence will come next.  These essays are a cure for literary claustrophobia.

Although the longer essays are impressive, I confess that I was especially fond of the shorter ones, which are still plenty complex.  For example “Awakenings”, which begins with the narrator chatting with her dead mother, whom she discovers standing beside her bed.  When she says she wants to talk, her mother says,

“Well, be quick about it.  Just until I’ve finished my cigarette.”

She tells her mother, “This past fall I went to Kaunas.  Your granddaughter, looking out the window of the bus, saw a cow and asked, Does that cow belong to anyone, or is it Nobody’s?  I said, Cows always belong to someone, only people can be Nobody’s.  Mom. . . Now, when I wake up in a pool of sweat, most often at daybreak, I start to feel quite clearly that I myself belong to Nobody.  My eyes are Nobody’s.  My arms are Nobody’s.  My legs, skin, nails, lungs, breath, and hair – Nobody’s.  It makes me feel terrible.”

Her mother responds, “How did your daughter’s semester go?” (40)

Radvilavičiūtė is a master of the aside, the parenthetical.  When the doctor asks, “By the way, how are your relations with men?”, here’s the response:

“’Very good,’ I said, thinking of men generally, as a sort of aggregate. (As half of humanity.  Or like penguins in a snowstorm, huddled in a pile in distant Antarctica.)” (43).

This must have been a difficult book to translate, but it doesn’t read that way – it is engaging, clear and smooth.  Perhaps Novickas took the advice of the narrator in the final essay: “I think you can really only translate good prose smoothly when you’re a bit drunk.  And during a full moon.”

This book needs to be discovered!  Please read it, enjoy it, then spread the word around.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

Published in Brazil in 1880 as Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas

Translated from the Portuguese by William L. Grossman

Foreword by Susan Sontag

This book is an example of a genre woefully under-utilized: the posthumous memoir.  As Bras Cubas reports, “I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing” (5).  If only this could happen more often.  Just think of all the people who would almost unquestionably be more interesting from the other side of the grave than they are on this side.  Kissinger springs to mind. 

(A little more seriously: can you think of other novels that use this device?  I would love to make a list.  Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, with Penelope in Hades giving her side of the story, is the only one I know, though I’m sure that there are many more.  If you think of one, could you respond in the comments?)

“But in death, what a difference!  what relief!  what freedom!  How glorious to throw away your cloak, to dump your spangles in a ditch, to unfold yourself, to strip off all your paint and ornaments, to confess plainly what you are and what you failed to be!” (57)  This is the energy that inhabits the 160 very short chapters of this book, as Bras Cubas recounts, in extraordinary style, the rather ordinary life of a 19^th century Brazilian aristocrat.

When I first spotted this book, in the library of a monastery, I chose it because it seemed the most worldly book available.  However, it is so relentless in stripping away human vanity, pretension and self-delusion that it nearly qualifies as a spiritual text.

The book had grabbed my attention because I instantly loved its title.  In fact, “Epitaph of a Small Winner” is actually the subtitle of the original novel.  Although I noticed that other people disliked this translation, I found it very readable. 

That said, plenty of people over 35 are going to reject this book as soon as they open it for the simplest reason.  This is obviously a reprint of a printing done in the Fifties – and it appears to have been done on a mimeograph machine from that period.  Letters are fuzzy, blotchy and blurred.  Unworthy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux!   

It seems condescending to applaud a 19^th century book for being “modern”, but, I’m sorry, I can’t avoid it.  This is a post-modern text, written in 1880, which may be a bigger trick than a memoir written from the grave. . .  Fragmentation, a peculiar viewpoint,  commentary on top of commentary – it is all so lively and so much fun.  Fans of Rushdie or Saramago (or even Vonnegut or Murakami) will feel immediately at home.

I loved this book both times I read it and I'm grateful it's in print.  If it was in print we could actually easily read, that’d be even better.

The Function of the Shopping Cart, In This Life and the Next

When I was a child I believed that when I went to sleep a witch arrived to carry me off to the land of dreams.  The means of transportation was a clattering shopping cart, same as at Ferretti’s Grocery.  The witch herself was somewhat craggy.  She was downright geologic.  In profile she looked exactly like a solitary volcano on Mars, as depicted on the poster on my bedroom wall from the Boston Museum of Science.  The witch looked just like that volcano.  Her hat was a Martian cloud.

After death the shopping cart ascended.  The wheels ceased to clatter.  The witch only went part way.  In structure the afterlife resembled two parking garages, one on either side, extending as far as the eye could see.  Worlds were stacked one on top of each other, all the way up and all the way down, innumerable worlds.  Heaven and Hell (there were many of both) were not above and below but right beside each other.  The shopping cart rose in a column of air between them.

Heaven was on the left side.  Hell was to the right.  Or else it was the other way round.  (Was it possible my shopping cart was spinning?)  Here was the crux of the problem: Heaven and Hell kept switching sides.  Countless heavens, countless hells.  You had to choose between them.

This was extremely difficult because Hell mimicked Heaven and did all it could to seem like a really good time.  Hell promised homemade cookies, unlimited pinball and the company of the Strawberry Quik bunny.  Not until too late did you learn that the cookies had pond slugs in them, that you were the ball in the machine, that the evil pink bunny would never ever stop tickling.

Heaven couldn’t help but seem a little dull.  It was the sort of place you loved once you got there, like Aunt Pilar’s house, but without the cactuses.

Which to choose?  Which was the real Heaven?  Which was torture?  I couldn’t decide.  I wished the witch was still with me, perhaps she could advise. 

Meanwhile the shopping cart continued to ascend.    

Half-Digested

I am now forty years old.  That’s four and a zero.  Another way of saying this is: I am now half-digested.  Although I often find fault with myself, the truth is that I look pretty good for something half-digested, something halfway through the gullet of the world – though of course I may be shot out at any time. . .

Some people say that I am dissolute.  I say that this is highly appropriate for one half-dissolved.  Excessive self-regard is absurd at this stage.  I don’t let that stop me.

I am in the process of being digested.  Gradually I am broken down and dispersed.  To tell the truth, it is a highly peculiar situation.  Actually, I was never born.  Not quite.  The appearance was a ruse.  I never emerged.  Not for a moment have I been anything separate.  Just the same I am falling apart quite nicely.  Falling apart has proven to be something I can actually do, unlike riding a bicycle.

Ideally I would like to be nutritious.  You’ll laugh, but -- actually I would like to be wholesome.  At least fibrous.  I would somehow like to compensate for all the waste my appearance has occasioned, from the first diaper to this morning’s milk carton.  That is why I have such high literary ambitions.  I aspire that my contribution to literature will be at least half as significant and enduring as the little white cups of creamer I dump into my coffee.  I am a highly ambitious and indeed reckless person.

I am now forty years old.  (I am guessing this is now the intestines?)  The world is the solvent into which I am dissolving my body, this packet of nonsense.

In Praise of Distraction

No question but that it saves lives every day.

I decided to kill myself.  Unfortunately the gas had been turned off.  It took me nearly an hour to find the bill.  Here in Tokyo, we pay our bills at the convenience store.  While I was there, I discovered that there is now a grape chu-hi with eight percent alcohol.  Grape Zero Strong!  This was highly encouraging, but it was not enough to save my life.  Just then the football team came in for Cokes, in sweat and grins and sleeveless shirts.  You must keep in mind that you yourself cannot know the extent of your good works.  It may be that one day in high school your armpit saved someone’s life.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Robert Walser

Robert Walser

A Schoolboy’s Diary

Translated by Damion Searls

New York Review of Books, 2013

To pretend that I am a sedate and demure fan of Robert Walser, in hopes of thereby seeming reasonable, would be misleading to the point of dishonesty. Robert Walser is my very favorite writer (indeed, a word like master or guide seems more appropriate) and I should admit up front that my opinions are those of a fanatic.

Although Robert Walser remains under-appreciated, there is also a growing group of Walser devotees who seek out everything available. Some of these ardent fans seek, as I do, to create new work informed and inspired by Walser.

Unsurprisingly, I've sought out everything by Walser that is available in translation and I feel strenuously grateful to NYRB for this new series of thematic collections of Walser's short prose. (Berlin Stories translated by Susan Bernofsky is another delightful book in this series, and I hope ardently that there are more to come.)

Still, as years pass, and collections appear, I begin to worry that new collections of short pieces from Walser's vast un-translated work will begin to seem "picked over", just gleanings or scraps. Although it is true, as Walser writes, that "Enthusiasts are happy with little, in fact often extremely miniscule things" (163), I came to this book hoping that truly beautiful and first-rate work is yet to appear.

In this hope, I was not disappointed. Above all, what A Schoolboy's Diary makes clear is that Walser's trove of un-translated work is nowhere near to being picked over. The stories here are as necessary and enchanting as those to be found in any of the 5 collections of short prose currently available. (Fellow Walserians, please correct me if I have miscounted.)

Although I think readers new to Walser would do well to begin with a "general" collection of the short prose such as Selected Stories, translated by Christopher Middleton, or Masquerade, translated by Susan Bernofsky, these thematic collections are a great pleasure and you would not be wrong to start your exploration of Robert Walser right here.

Fanatics tend to disapprove of innovations and new arrivals. I admit that I questioned, as I picked up this book, whether Damion Searls could possibly be as worthy a translator as Middleton and Bernofsky, to whom readers of Walser in English are wholly indebted. ("Some young upstart", I assumed. Totally wrong. Although his appearance is youthful, he has an august list of translation credits a mile long.)

Though I came to this book armed and ready to disapprove, I found myself unable to - these are beautiful and flowing translations, like one of the sparkling lakes or streams that Walser often seems to be ambling alongside.

As usual, I read aloud and copied out passages that enchanted me. How is it possible to resist a writer who announces, "To give you an opportunity to see me would mean introducing you to a person who cuts off half the rim of his felt hat with scissors to give it a wilder, more bohemian appearance. Is that the kind of strange being you really want to have before you?"(51)

At a time when most people seem to consider themselves so terribly important, Walser's sauntering humility has a special resonance. How good it is to be reminded, "Tact and discretion are never anything over than attractive. Modestly stepping aside can never be recommended as a continual practice in strong enough terms." (161) Or simply: "Envy is a form of insanity." (53)

Pieces like "From My Youth" made me feel that I could see and understand Walser more directly than I had before. "Early spring was magnificent. All the houses, trees and streets gleamed as though they had come from some higher state of being. It was half dream, half fever. I was never sick, just always strangely and seriously infected with a longing for extraordinary things." (124)

As someone who seeks to emulate Walser, I endlessly compose short pieces, endlessly send them out, and endlessly receive friendly and baffled rejection notes. Admittedly, I often suspect that my uselessness as a human being is unsurpassed. How imperative therefore to read "The Last Prose Piece", in which Walser warns me against his profession in the strongest possible terms. How wrenching to find that Walser felt as discouraged as I feel as he endlessly wrote and submitted work -- indeed he writes, "The extent of my submissions will probably never be matched." (146) May these reminders of work and suffering banish my squirrely self-pity.

Above all, it is painful to read Walser's repeated desire to simply give up - though of course he cannot and will not, not until he enters the last sanatorium in 1933. "At last I have drawn a firm line under the truly astoundingly great column of figures and am done with pursuing that for which I am not sufficiently intelligent" (149).

What I would give for a time machine, so that I might rush back in time and encourage him. I'd also like to buy him a new hat.

Old and new fans of Robert Walser will revel in this book. As Walser reminds us, "When you are faced with a happiness that is not forbidden, you must seize and enjoy it." (177)