The Tanners

Nobody has ever written a more light-hearted account of anxiety and anomie than Robert Walser. "Light-headed" might also describe Walser's literary personality.. light-headed in the sense of 'giddy' that is.. as well as Walser the man, whose head clearly floated lightly on his shoulders. In case you've never heard of him, Walser was born in Switzerland in 1878, one child in a large and eccentric family. He led an unsteady and flighty sort of life, working here and there as a butler, a bank clerk, a shop assistant, etc. and writing nine novels and hundreds of stories. He was 'known' to and influential on other German writers, including Kafka, but scarcely a literary success. He spent some stays in mental institutions, finally being committed permanently in 1933. He remained institutionalized (and sadly unable to write) until his death in 1956. This novel "The Tanners" is a thinly fictionalized portrayal of his early life. It's not about a bunch of leather workers; "Tanner" is the family name of five siblings, whose lives carom off each other without truly melding over the course of two years of meandering. The title in German - Die Geschwister Tanner - literally means 'The Tanner Siblings'. Simon Tanner, the central character, is unquestionably, Robert Walser's self-portrait. It's as powerful a revelation of the artist's interior being as any of Vincent van Gogh's self-portraits.Walser flitted through life and through the sentences of his writing as lightly as a dragonfly, and yet his writing never seems aimless or parenthetical. It's "one thing after another" and yet it never seems aimless or shapeless. Some of his best stories and some of the most enticing chapters of 'The Tanners' are simply accounts of long walks, during which the 'narrator' observes, absorbs, abandons whatever he encounters next. It seems almost as random as 'real life', but don't be deceived! Walser is not just a note-taker of life; his literary walks draw upon his actual walks, but they are subtle shaped and edited. The man Walser never had the vaguest idea where he was walking to, but the writer Walser prepared his itinerary artfully.Walser was unpublishable in the Germany of the Third Reich - a 'decadent' to that crowd - and all but forgotten until the 1970s. But there seems to be a rising tide floating his reputation these days, both in Germany and the Anglophone world. One factor may be the concurrently rising fame of W.G. Sebald, the German author who spent much of his life in England. Sebald (1944-2001) wrote a reminiscence of Walser, translated as the introduction to this English edition of The Tanners, in which he acknowledges the influence Walser had on his own work. It's characteristic Sebald, complete with odd peripheral photographs, and it's also utterly Walserian.Reading Walser, I often find myself wondering, "Wait a moment... where was I just now? I know I was thrilled to be there, but..." It's that lightness of being. Surely someone whose short-term memory is destroyed by a concussion must experience life as a Walser novel, but that someone would need to be ineffably light-hearted. There's no evidence that Walser was autistic -- in fact, he couldn't have been, in any standard diagnosis -- but there is a kind of autism in his writing, a subtle sense that the characters don't respond to the social clues and signals in any normal manner. Right in the middle of The Tanners, for instance, while Simon Tanner is walking overnight across a winter-bound mountain, he comes upon a frozen corpse. The dead man is a young poet friend of Simon's sister, a character of even more fragile eccentricity than Simon himself. But Simon isn't horrified. Not at all! Instead he marvels at the poetic aptness of such a death, and wishes he had flowers to strew on the corpse. Walser's usually simple prose ascends to rare ecstatic beauty in this scene.This translation by Susan Bernofsky is extraordinarily close in affect to the original. Dare I say, as good as the original? I've had the German text for some years; it's available now on amazon USA. There are some loopy Swiss-German touches in it, which don't survive translation, but otherwise the reader will meet the same light-stepping Walser in English as auf Deutsch. Perhaps I should be peremptory: Robert Walser was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, in German or any other language. You NEED to read him.

Within the first few pages of 'The Tanners', there is a wonderfully clever description of the oldest, and most worry-laden, of the Tanner siblings, Klaus: 'He was one of those people who feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them'. These lines come book-ended around the reader's introduction to the main character, the youngest of the Tanners, Simon - first with his bizarre, brazen appeal for employment and then his equally impertinent criticism of his employer as he walks off the job a month later. Taken together, it would seem that, initially at least, Walser's style is trending in a certain direction, one that is reminiscent of more contemporary novels - absurdist situations coupled with dry humor and nimble observations - and curiously self-aware for a product of 1907.But beginning with the following chapter and on through the rest of the book, Walser nearly abandons this style. Instead, he unhitches his narrative from conventional techniques and is content to pursue any diversionary notion or thought his characters might have - from spending pages dreamily considering the emotional resonance of a forest, or fantasizing about platonic love, or the advantages of country life, or even the sights, sounds and characters of a public eating house. In fact, there really is no 'getting on with it' for the entire book - substantially, these wandering notes, this accumulation of detail that defines Walser's characters more by outline than by direct examination *is* the entire point. The trajectory of its characters is irrelevant, subplots begin and go nowhere, and, much like in reality, everyone is essentially the same in the end as they were at the start.Walser, in 'The Tanners', reminds me quite a bit of Hungarian author Gyula Krudy's  Sunflower , although that reference is too obscure to be much help. Those readers who are familiar with W. G. Sebald will probably recognize Walser's influence on that writer, even without the help of Sebald's sterling essay on Walser included here as an introduction. But Jed Lipinski's brief review in the Village Voice which simultaneously compares Walser to Kafka and nominates 'The Tanners' as "contender for Funniest Book of the Year" makes me wonder what book he read in its place. Perhaps if he'd had more than a paragraph in which to review the book, he could adequately defend both of those statements, but I would direct any reader interested in Robert Walser to look *anywhere* else for guidance. Walser's qualities are certainly unique - nearly sui generis - and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend his work for those looking for something different, but it seems to me that it serves no one well to present this work as something it's not.Going strictly by the taglines accompanying each star rating, I probably should have rated 'The Tanners' two stars, as I found it overlong and difficult to finish. But Walser's singularity is still interesting in and of itself, and I'd like to try more of his works - especially his short stories, since I think that venue might showcase Walser's qualities in the best light. Additionally, W. G. Sebald's introductory essay, 'Le Promeneur Solitaire' (from a forthcoming collection entitled 'A Place in the Country') is excellent, as usual, and since it deals with Walser's work as a whole, it makes me want to try more before giving up. This one will surely not be every reader's cup of tea, but may be perfect for those listening for a unique voice.

Disappointed that it came damaged.