In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag
describes Walser as a good-humored, sweet Beckett. The more common
comparison is to a comic Kafka. Both formulations effectively describe
the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the
presence of a mind-bending genius, but one characterized by a wry,
buoyant voice, as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing.
Walser is one of the twentieth century's great modern masters--revered
by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebald--and
Selected Stories gives the fullest display of his talent. He is most
at home in the mode of short fiction, according to J. M. Coetzee in The
New York Review of Books. The stories show him at his dazzling best.