A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most
influential figures of twentieth-century fiction.
Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert
Walser's homeland and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his
childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published in the last of his
four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern.
Between these two poles, the book maps Walser's outer and inner
wanderings in various narrative modes. Here you find him writing in the
persona of a girl composing an essay on the seasons, of Don Juan at the
moment he senses he's outplayed his role, and of Turkey's last sultan
shortly after he's deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with
the heroine of the penny dreadful he's reading (and she with him?), and
the lady of a house catches her servant spread out on the divan casually
reading a classic. Three longer autobiographical stories--"Wenzel,"
"Würzburg," and "Louise"--brace the whole. In addition to a
representative offering of Walser's short prose, of which he was one of
literature's most original, multifarious, and lucid practitioners,
Little Snow Landscape forms a kind of novel, however apparently
plotless, from the vast unfinishable one he was constantly writing.
