The Tanners, Robert Walser's amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is
now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning
translator Susan Bernofsky. Three brothers and a sister comprise the
Tanner family--Simon, Kaspar, Klaus, and Hedwig: their wanderings,
meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of
employment over the course of a year or two are the threads from which
Walser weaves his airy, strange and brightly gorgeous fabric.
Robert Walser--admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin--is
a radiantly original author. He has been acclaimed "unforgettable,
heart-rending" (J.M. Coetzee), "a bewitched genius" (Newsweek), and "a
major, truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer" (Susan Sontag).
Considering Walser's "perfect and serene oddity," Michael Hofmann in
The London Review of Books remarked on the "Buster Keaton-like
indomitably sad cheerfulness [that is] most hilariously disturbing."
The Los Angeles Times called him "the dreamy confectionary snowflake
of German language fiction. He also might be the single most underrated
writer of the 20th century....The gait of his language is quieter than a
kitten's."
"A clairvoyant of the small" W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser, one of
his favorite writers in the world, in his acutely beautiful, personal,
and long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.
