The Art of Being Almost Nothing

What if the people who fail to become important are the ones worth watching most closely?

In Robert Walser’s Prose Pieces, a sausage disappears into the catastrophe of having been eaten. A writer sent abroad would rather remain at home with his cat. A bachelor scandalizes respectable people by being perfectly happy. A man wanders from institution to institution in search of the one place where he belongs. A penniless passerby encounters a calf, a dog and a goat—and discovers that having nothing does not mean having nothing to give.

Across eighteen miniature masterpieces, Walser turns the supposedly negligible into a strange and inexhaustible territory. Success becomes suspicious; failure acquires dignity. Laziness proves unexpectedly energetic. Respectability shades into absurdity. The ridiculous becomes touching, while the touching is rescued from sentimentality by a sudden flicker of mischief.

Nothing in Walser remains securely what it was called.

His narrators interrupt themselves, argue with their own metaphors, address the reader, wander away from their stories and return by unexpected routes. Repetition becomes comedy; digression becomes method; awkward compounds seem to invent thoughts that ordinary language cannot quite contain. The prose advances while simultaneously watching itself advance.

Yet beneath this playfulness lies a remarkably consistent question: Why should a life have to be exceptional before it deserves our attention?

Walser gravitates toward the unnoticed—the unsuccessful writer, the frightened pupil, the forsaken woman, the lonely bachelor, the foolish wanderer, the animal unable to speak for itself. He does not transform them into conventional heroes. He does something more radical: he leaves them small.

Funny, tender, unsettling and startlingly modern, Prose Pieces reveals a writer for whom the margin is not outside the world but perhaps the best place from which to see it.