Selected Stories
Robert Walser (New York Review of Books Classics) $12.95

The biographical note that introduces this collection of short stories drops on its reader like a dark harbinger of literary doom: Author Robert Walser was a successful and prolific writer up until he voluntarily committed himself to a mental institution in midlife, and refused to write again. "I am not here to write," he reportedly told a friend, "but to be mad."

Walser's 42 biographical sketches, essays, and anecdotes included in this New York Review of Books reprint (1907-1929) make up a beautiful portrait of disorder. Each piece is poetic, elegant, surprising, with dashes and doses of amusing declarations. In "Helbling Story," the deliciously boring Helbling--the character who inspired Kafka's Josef K--painfully attests to his own dullness: "My bearing is rather idiotic, rather vain, too; my voice sounds odd, as if I myself, the speaker, did not know that I was speaking, when I am speaking."

Described by Susan Sontag in her 1982 foreword as "essays in idleness," these pieces lack form as much as they lack purpose as a collection. However, they offer a brilliant illustration of the delight and struggle for a lightness of gravity. The looseness of form in the short story allows Walser to do what he does best: rush toward an object and scrupulously inspect it until he is done with it (sometimes 10 lines, sometimes 10 pages). His taste in the selection of these characters--or moods, or visions--seems not planned but not arbitrary; it simply lacks the restriction of formal design.

The editors of the collection should have expanded beyond the introductions by Sontag and translator Christopher Middleton, which, though offering insight into some aspects of Walser's lifelong "demonic anguish," are so clearly enthusiastic about his writing that they never face the question of why it ultimately was not enough for him to do just that--write. Why did he give it up "to be mad"? MEGAN PURN