The Genius of Robert Walser - The New York Review of Books - article by JM Coetzee
The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer.

All his prose pieces, he suggested in retrospect, might be read as chapters in "a long, plotless, realistic story," a "cut up or disjoined book of the self [Ich-Buch]."

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NYRB. (1878-1956) . In 1933 /so, age 55/ he entered an insane asylum—he remained there for the rest of his life—and quit writing. "I am not here to write," he said, "but to be mad." oh.


inquisitive irreverent account of life in most uncanny of schools.
the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality & disconcerting humor, whose sentences beautiful simple strange.

a heartbreaking writer — Susan Sontag. ...Beckett + Stevie Smith not waving but drowning.

elusive and surprising sensibility

droll, whimsical, tender, heartbreaking verbal artifacts.
TheNation: has rarest of gifts really?* c'mon. that's not the rarest ability ability to get the spirit onto the page at flick of th pen.


*say 'Really?' in the exasperated rhetorical way of Always Sunny. like: Really, you are going to rat me out? Really, you are going to wear all spandex to this?