Walks With Walser

Carl Seelig‘s notes of his walks with Robert Walser are unequalled in literature. They draw the portrait of one who has gone silent, of a poet who, like Hölderlin, was »considerate« enough to renounce life. After his 50th birthday, Robert Walser quit writing and contented himself with leading the life of the patient in a mental asylum. In 1936, Carl Seelig, friend and admirer, visits the great Swiss writer in the asylum with the aim of helping him and his work, seemingly condemned to a permanent lack of success, and for twenty years their time together was spent walking.

 

»As they strolled, Walser told stories, shared his daily experiences of the sanatorium, and expressed his opinions about books and art, writing and history. Filled with lively anecdotes and details, Walks With Walser offers the fullest available account of this wonderful writer’s inner and outer life.« (excerpt from the book description from the English edition by New Directions)

»Anyone who walks through the Appenzellerland in the author’s footsteps will soon find abysses.« Manuel Müller, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Reading Carl Seelig’s Walks with Walser again is also worthwhile because the view of both protagonists has changed a great deal in the decades since their deaths.« Lothar Müller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»A kind of biography on Walser, a book on walking and drinking, a book of comfort. […] Selig has erected a memorial in his honour.« Der Tagesspiegel

»During their walks and conversations […] the two of them developed Walser as an author who was by no means a fanciful, minor post-Romantic poet but a highly self-reflective modern poet.« Erhard Schütz, der Freitag

»After a nervous breakdown in 1929, Walser spent the remaining 27 years of his life in mental asylums, going from outer exile to inner exile. Walking replaced writing for Walser, and from 1936 onward his friend Carl Seelig recorded their conversations while they walked in Switzerland. It’s an extraordinary book that prompted me to found my first museum in 1992: a migratory Robert Walser museum on the theme of the periphery.« Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Vulture

»A pleasure.« Frankfurter Neue Presse