Robert Walser (1878--1956) the Swis...

Robert Walser (1878--1956) the Swiss-German master of high modernist plain was once so well known that Robert Musil, reviewing Franz Kafka's first volume of stories, described Kafka as a "special case of the Walser type" Kafka was among Walser's contemporary admirers, as were Hermann Hesse and Walter Benjamin. Walser's quirkily modernist sensibility has since endeared him to contemporary writers and thinkers as various as Martin Walser (no relation), Susan Sontag, William H Gass, and Max Frisch.

Walser wrote as many as nine novels (all if it were not that four of which are lost)