A Walk That Refuses the Straight Line

A man puts on his hat and goes for a walk.

From this almost absurdly modest beginning, Robert Walser creates a world.

A professor becomes a monument to authority. A bookseller provokes a comedy about literary success. A tailor turns into an adversary worthy of military strategy. A tax official forces the wandering writer to defend the usefulness of walking. Children, shop windows, trees, factories, dogs, singers, strangers, and even scraps of paper acquire the intensity of discoveries.

And then there is Tomzack—a gigantic, haunting figure who seems to belong neither to life nor to death.

Nothing in The Walk stays small for long.

Walser’s great originality lies in what he does with attention. To walk is not to withdraw from the world but to enter it more completely. The apparently idle observer sees what hurried people overlook. A road becomes a field of thought; an encounter becomes an argument; a trivial irritation opens onto society, art, work, solitude, or mortality.

Yet Walser does something stranger still.

His narrator does not merely walk. He watches himself telling the story of his walk. He digresses, corrects himself, apologizes to the reader, anticipates what he will write next, loses his way in language, and cheerfully finds it again. The prose itself begins to wander.

This edition presents the original 1917 version, in which that audacious narrative freedom appears with particular vividness.

Comic, eccentric, tender, and gradually shadowed by melancholy, The Walk asks a question whose urgency has only increased in an age of speed and constant productivity:

What might we discover if, instead of rushing toward a destination, we allowed ourselves to notice the world along the way?