Robert Walser: Selected Stories

Started him yesterday evening. Did I see his name first in Kafka?

Anyway, when I read somewhere he was a softer, kinder Beckett, I thought, yeah, I've got to read him.

Actually, according to Susan Sontag's foreward, it's a bit more complicated than that:
   Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose--as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, as literature's present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly.
Haven't read much yet, but this ending to "Flower Days" is fantastic:
All the same, one has to do one's duty as a citizen, nobody should make a face, nobody think he has a right to pass the flower days off with a quiet smile. They are a fact of life; but one should respect facts. Should one really?

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