Robert Walser

In Tuesday’s quiz, the first two sentences were written by Robert Musil, the Austrian author of The Man without Qualities. The writer whose work he was reviewing, and the author of the third excerpt, is Robert Walser, a strange, unclassifiable, utterly lovable Swiss writer whose work may or may not be undergoing a revival in the English-speaking world.

Since 2000, at least four Walser titles in English have been published or re-published, including his incomparable short novel Jacob van Gunten, translated by poet Christopher Middleton, a veritable one-man lobby for Walser in English. Walser, however, has always had notable, enthusiastic admirers, including Kafka, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, Guy Davenport and William H. Gass. In his 1914 review, Musil even refers to Kafka as "a special case of the Walser type."

The Walser sentence I chose – and Walser is one of those rare writers whose sensibility is stamped like a watermark on every sentence – comes from "A Sketch," translated by Michael Hamburger and dated 1928-29. Only 12 paragraphs long, about a page and a half, it concludes like this:

"The garden somewhat resembled a thought fortunately not thought to a conclusion, and, without having any idea where I get the effrontery to do so, I compare my sketch with a swan singing with unheard of ardor and screechingly giving voice to unmediated things."

The final destination of a Walser story can never be surmised from its starting point. The tone of a Walser story is playful and gentle, composed in the voice of a man for whom the mundane is always strange and interesting. They never descend into self-conscious whimsy, and they often carry a subterranean resonance of fear and sadness.

Walser, born in 1878, entered a mental hospital in 1933, when he stopped writing, and remained there until he died in 1956. This Christmas will mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Walser was an inveterate walker – many of his stories begin as walks – and his body was found that day in the snow. He had suffered a heart attack. A visitor, who had asked why he no longer wrote, quoted Walser as saying, "I am not here to write but to be mad."

Guy Davenport inserts Walser as the querulous narrator of his story "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg," published in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. It concludes like this:

"There are the tracks of the rabbit. I think they said at the table that today is Christmas. I do not know.

"But let us desist, lest quite by accident we be so unlucky as to put these things in order."