The Robber by Robert Walser

I was reminded today of one of my all-time favourite books, The Robber. This is one of the most stunning books I've ever read, even though I've only been able to read it in translation. It is also a criminally neglected book by a criminially neglected author. Robert Walser is one of the most clever, funny, and intelligent of the Europeans. The Robber is an absolutely hilarious story about an unnamed Robber caught in a bizarre love triangle. The book is a wild collection of small sketches and non-sequiters that somehow coalesce into a witty and innovative novel that is as much about its narrator/author as it is about The Robber or any of the other characters.

It begins with one of the greatest first lines of any book:

Edith loves him. More on this later.

The introduction to my edition calls the novel a "quirky masterpiece of high modernism" and it's a good five-word description. The first lines (above) set the standard for the tone of the book, which endlessly promises and evades its own narrative. In many respects, you might consider the true story of the novel to be a tale of an author attempting to simultaneously tell and withhold his story. But in addition to being a very innovative, experimental narrative, it's very readable and humorous. A later quote where the narrator has once again begun speaking of himself, in an evasive move to avoid telling the story:

People might suppose I've a low opinion of myself. On my table lie magazines. How could someone they name as honorary subscriber be a person of little worth? Often I receive entire bundles of letters, which clearly demonstrates that here and there I'm very much in people's thoughts. If I ever make a visit where visits have significance, I'd do it quite cozily, with respect, and, as for the rest, as if I had one of my hands in my coat pocket, that is, a touch woodenly. For it's amusing to appear somewhat awkward, I mean to say, there's something beautiful about it. Poor Robber, I'm neglecting you completely. It's said he likes to eat semolina pudding, and worships anyone who fries him up some nice Rösti potatoes. Admittedly this is slander on my part, but with a person like this, why split hairs? Now something about that deceased widow. Across from me stands a house whose façade is quite simply a poem. French troops who marched into our city in 1798 beheld the countenance of this house, provided they took the trouble or had the time to notice it.

I love how everything in this story is so contingent on knowledge its author does not have, as in those final lines (which, you will notice, are offered as if they related somehow to a dead widow, more of this endless deferral of the story proper).

Every once in a while Walser attempts to summarize the events of the book. But his narrator-character fails miserably as an author, which in many respects is the source of much of the book's humour. Walser is working very hard to appear the clown, and a clever clown he makes:

The general state of affairs now appears to us as follows: Edith has behaved rather bunglingly toward "her" Robber. She committed noteworthy errors. I, for my part, have stated in these pages my wish to take him by the hand and lead him to her so he can stand before her like a sort of sinner and beg her forgiveness. But ought he to beg her forgiveness on account of her bungling? Really there wouldn't be any point to it. So now I find myself in a slight pickle, seeing these reconciliatory negotiations dangling once again in uncertainty. Though it's true I regard the indefinite, at times, as auspicious. For how am I to know what sort of welcome Edith will offer us in the event of our attempting a timid knock at her door? After all, it might well occur to her to slam the door on our, that is, my and my Robber's nose, perhaps saying to us: "Get lost, both of you." Assuredly she's still fuming at me. And at him as well? I couldn't say. In point of fact, she's a habitual fumer. For a time she appear to us, that is, to all those she encountered, with a brownish tinge to her.

Walser is a writer you need to read, whoever you may be. His work is very funny and has an air of innocence about it that is truly delightful yet tempered with a very sad and a very quiet underbelly of knowledge.

Besides, how can you not love a guy who describes himself as a "honorary subscriber" to various magazines?