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."

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?