‘Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness’ said the Swiss writer Robert Walser and this wonderful, lively and deeply unusual book is a powerful argument for collecting and protecting that bit of weirdness, that singular, only-personal view of the world. Here are forty-two short pieces like paintings by Watteau or Constable; full of a beauty that has been long contemplated and deeply felt — as he insists in A Little Ramble, a tribute to the simple and strong attraction of nature ‘we already see so much!’.

Perhaps there is a very Swiss delight with landscape here and in other pieces including the fabulous title story The Walk which explicates — in a lovely mock-pompous language, reminiscent of Raymond Queneau’s hilarious The Sunday of Life (Les Dimanches de la vie; see French Babel Guide) — the joys, or the real Zen of a walk. A serious business, the walk, especially the extraordinary, passionate, uninhibited and freethinking walk that Walser takes in a world not yet flooded with stinking cars and raucous trucks...

Read this collection and meet a remarkable man who, if he had been more mentally stable, might be today as revered as Thomas Mann or Hermann Hesse, combining as they often do satire with contemplative wisdom and, while celebrating the eternal things an artist worships; the changing of the seasons, the glory of a face or a song, introduces us to his unique Walseresque cracked logic that renews the external world for us while feeding the inner one.

Perhaps unexpectedly for an-often satirical writer Walser’s brilliance is accompanied by a tremendous warmth and gentle respect for human souls — ‘every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls’ — which puts him on the side of the reader just as he is on the side of all his varied protagonists. He appreciates them all for their diverse humanities whether famous poet, twelve-year-old girl or Impressionist painter, and whatever narrow horizons or awkward personalities they may have. Read and be amazed and entertained.

‘I always then look darkly at the wheels, at the car as a whole, but never at its occupants, whom I despise, and this in no way personally, but purely on principle; for I do not understand, and I never shall understand, how it can be a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of misery and despair. In fact I love repose and all that reposes. I love thrift and moderation and am in my inmost self, in God’s name, unfriendly toward any agitation and haste. More than what is true I need not say. And because of these words the driving of automobiles will certainly not be discontinued, nor its evil air-polluting smell, which nobody for sure particularly loves and esteems. It would be unnatural if someone’s nostrils were to love and inhale with relish that which for all correct nostrils, at times, depending perhaps on the mood one is in, outrages and evokes revulsion. Enough, and no harm meant. And now walk on. Oh, it is heavenly and good in simplicity most ancient to walk on foot, provided of course one’s shoes or boots are in order.’ p64 (from The Walk)