The Tanners

Although the Swiss-born modernist Robert Walser was cited as a favorite author by Franz Kafka and Robert Musil, his stellar fan base never translated into actual fame, at least during his lifetime. He died inglorious and relatively unknown, dead in the snow of a heart attack, after having resided in a mental institution for most of the last 27 years of his life. The man whom W.G. Sebald, in his introduction to The Tanners, calls “a clairvoyant of the small” not only observed and beautifully reported the easy-to-miss minutiae of his surroundings in four surviving novels and hundreds of shorter pieces, but actually wrote, in pencil, in a hand so tiny that editors have found some of it indecipherable.

The Tanners—an early semiautobiographical novel, but the last to be translated into English—is the story of the utterly unambitious Simon Tanner and his siblings Kaspar, Klaus and Hedwig (there is one more brother, consigned to a mental institution, but he’s mentioned only in passing). Much to his upright brother Klaus’s chagrin, Simon is content to neither contribute to nor detract from society, perfectly happy to be a whimsical nonentity. At first glance, Simon seems unremarkable (if eccentric), floating through life and flouting bourgeois conventions. But watch him, and you’ll see that his statements are hilarious, subversive and sometimes deeply strange. “If one wishes to have an employee,” Simon reprimands his bewildered boss, “I believe one should know how to accommodate him.”

Walser’s writing lacks much of the outright cynicism and existential despair that characterizes the work of his better-known contemporaries. The sensibility is that of a writer who understands misery but chooses to dance a jig around it, hinting at the melancholy rather than diving in headfirst. Simon is the perfect vehicle for Walser’s playful, faux-obsequious language—through him, the many tangents and clownish hyperbole that make Walser so special seem natural. While none of his characters will ever be a leader—not Simon nor the servant protagonist of his 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten nor, obviously, the titular “hero” of The Assistant—in his treatment of them, Walser has shown himself to be every bit the master.—Drew Toal

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