Little Snow Landscape (New York Review Books Classics)

A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century fiction.Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert Walsers homeland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 Walsers 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 hes outplayed his role, and of Turkeys last sultan shortly after hes deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with the heroine of the penny dreadful hes 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, Wrzburg, and Louise-brace the whole. In addition to a representative offering of Walsers short prose, of which he was one of literatures 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.