Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

The first English-language biography of one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, written by his award-winning translator"Bernofsky takes us into the heart of an artist's life/work struggles, brilliantly illuminating Walser's exquisite sensibility and uncompromising radical innovations, while deftly tracking how his life gradually came apart at the seams. A tragic and intimate portrait."--Amy Sillman "Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and heart-breaking, this biography kept me drunk for days."--Eileen Myles The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest--social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten--prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him "a clairvoyant of the small."