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."

Jeffrey Eugenides Describes Joseph Roth's Chronicles

What I call a chronicle, the Portuguese, Spanish and, I believe, Italians call a cronica and the French (along with many other Europeans) a feuilleton. And one of the great masters of the chronicle/cronica/feuilleton was Joseph Roth. In fact, translator Michael Hoffman has argued that Roth's masterpieces were not his novels (of which I am no fan) but his chronicles, which he took very seriously and are indeed excellent. They are collected in English translation under the titles "What I Saw" and "Report From a Parisian Paradise." In the subtitle of the latter his pieces are, typically, misnamed essays. But in a New York Times review of "What I Saw," the writer, who is none other than the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides,  knows he is dealing with a different sort of animal. He writes: "A feuilleton is best described by what it isn't. It isn't news. It isn't the metro report. The opposite of an editorial, a feuilleton is descriptive, philosophical, meandering and poetically inclined. Though the word is French, the form reached its apogee in fin-de-siècle Vienna. An early master, Alfred Polgar, said, 'Life is too short for literature, too transitory for lingering description . . . too psychopathic for psychology, too fictitious for novels.' The feuilleton could never have prospered without the Viennese cafe, a place where the waiter brought over, along with your customary drink, your favorite newspaper. Roth wrote his first feuilletons in Vienna."

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
by Joseph Roth

Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939
by Joseph Roth