Nailing Robert Walser's Genre

The Guardian's Nicholas Lezard also got the genre right in his review of Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories." He writes: "You might remember that last week I compared islands to novels. It occurs to me that cities are, by a similar token, collections of short stories, or feuilletons like this."

A feuilleton is, of course, an alternative, French term (though it is also used in Germany) for what is otherwise known as a cronica, or chronicle.

Lezard was very taken with Walser's chronicles. He writes: "In this unbelievably delightful and timeless collection of short pieces, we can recover the delight of ordinary, uncondescending appreciation, places where the vacant-minded stroller can take 'peculiar pleasure'. The tram, the theatre, the train station, the park."

Robert Walser 'Stories' Fail to Deceive One Reviewer

Kudos to The Sunday New York Times Book Review for correctly suspecting that Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories" (see here,) issued by the New York Review of Books as a fiction title, are not really stories, not really fiction -- although it is in the Fiction Chronicle column that The Times chose to review the book. When Jan Stuart describes the book's offerings as "essayish 'stories'" you can feel the reviewer groping for the term that has gone missing from the English-language dictionary of literary genres: the chronicle. Which is ironic since Jan Stuart is the author of a book with the terms in its title: "The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece."

Fiction Tyranny Claims New Robert Walser Book

That dreadful, crazy If-It's-Literatue-It-Must-Be-Fiction compulsion strikes again in American publishing. The victim this time is Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories," which has just been published by the New York Review of Books, as part of its NYRB Classics collection. To judge by the one so-called story excerpted here,my suspicion that these would not really be stories but fuelleitons or chronicles was quite justified. The excerpt, "Good Morning, Giantess!" is in fact a classical chronicle, amounting to a poetically celebratory description of morning in the city, as people are heading in to work. Not a hint of fiction-making in it. Then why, why bury this under the "safe," homogenizing mantle of fiction rather that use it to help clear a much-need space in our culture for literary nonfiction?

Michael Hoffman on Joseph Roth

A biography of Joseph Roth, a great chronicler who also wrote the odd novel, is coming out. Its author is the revered translator, Michael Hoffman. "Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters" is due out this month from W. W. Norton.

Errol Morris and W.G. Sebald

The documentary-maker Errol Morris's book, "Believing Is Seeing (Observations of the Mysteries of Photography)," has been getting on quite a few Best of 2011 book lists, including those of The New York Times and The Washington Post. It does sound like an interesting project, and it is always good to see examples of the chronicle's close cousin, the essay, do well in the marketplace. But, to judge by a few excerpts from it, the New York Times reviewer went a little overboard when he stated that "Morris's book feels less like traditional photography criticism than like the novels of W. G. Sebald, which are similarly obsessed with truth, memory and war." It would indeed be like Sebald -- if Sebald were the sort of writer who cared as little about the art of prose as someone who is principally a filmmaker. Morris's talky writing does not rise above the standard of your average newspaper column or blog.

More on Joseph Roth

Having recently learned about Harry Mount and Notting Hill Editions (the Home of the Essay,) I explored their Web site to find that they publish a book about the great chronicler Joseph Roth ("Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth," by Dennis Marks) which is in itself a chronicle. Though, of course, Notting Hill doesn't call it that. What does the publisher call it? Presumably, since Notting Hill is the home of the essay, it considers the book an essay, but the promotional blurb avoids the label -- perhaps because Harry Mount has stated that an essay has to be shortish, not book-length. So the blurb reads: "In this revealing ‘psycho-geography’[inverted commas not mine], Dennis Marks makes a journey through the eastern border­lands of Europe to uncover the truth about Roth’s lost world. The result is a riveting and involving documentary that reunites Roth with his creative and spiritual landscape."

A Loss to the Chronicle Form

A great chronicle writer, Christa Wolf, is no more. Some of her exemplary chronicles (mislabeled as novels or memoirs in the U.S., of course): "In the Flesh," "Patterns of Childhood," "One Day a Year."