In 1905 Robert Walser packed his bags and left behind his native Switzerland for the bustling metropolis of Berlin. The fledgling author, twenty-seven years of age, had just published his first book of fiction, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher’s Essays), and moving to Berlin was the obvious next step for him to take in the pursuit of a proper literary career. Just a year before he had been supporting himself as an on-again-off-again bank clerk and copyist, but now he was looking to become a proper novelist, an endeavor that would require all his strength. When he arrived in the German capital, he moved into the apartment of his brother Karl, a painter, who had made the pilgrimage to Berlin the year before and quickly established himself as the foremost stage set designer of the age.

Walser soon discovered, however, that his brother’s high-society lifestyle was not to his liking. The fancy soirées they attended made him feel like a bumpkin, and he soon developed a reputation for uncouth conduct. Karl would receive invitations to dinner specifying he could bring Robert “only if he wasn’t too hungry.” It may well have been this gentrified arts scene in which artists and their patrons socialized together that made Walser decide to enroll, only a few months after his arrival, in Berlin’s Aristocratic Servants School. Here he studied the art of waiting on table, polishing shoes, and shaking out carpets. When he graduated, he took a job as an assistant butler at a count’s castle in Silesia, where he spent the better part of the winter. His publisher was instructed to send him letters only in unmarked envelopes, since he didn’t want his employers to know he was a writer.

He was a writer, though, and remained true to his craft. Over the next three years he would write and publish three novels: The Tanners, The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten, as well as producing scores of short pieces for publication in magazines and newspapers. Berlin Stories collects all the short work Walser wrote in Berlin about Berlin, as well as a selection of later pieces in which he looks back on his life in the metropolis. These stories are the record of a city in the throes of modernity. Berlin was already a vast metropolis, one of the great cities of Europe. It got its first subway in 1902; thirty-five different streetcar lines converged at Potsdamer Platz; and automobiles zipped in and out among hackney carriages on its crowded streets.

If the city was on the move, so was Walser. He walked the streets collecting impressions. He was a fast writer, and liked to write about things in rapid motion. In “Aschinger” he describes a Berlin-style fast-food restaurant, and his walk stories—like “Good morning, Giantess!”—show us the city as a blur of glimpses. “In the Electric Tram” talks about learning how to sit when riding in this newfangled vehicle, and “Full” features a monologue by a disgruntled omnibus conductor.

“A metropolis,” Walser writes, “is a giant spiderweb of squares, streets, bridges, buildings, gardens, and wide, long avenues […], a wave-filled ocean that for the most part is still largely unknown to its own inhabitants, an impenetrable forest, an opulent, overgrown, huge, forgotten, or half-forgotten park, a thing that has been built up too extensively for it to ever again be oriented within itself.” A fire breaking out in the city produces a “thick, seemingly incessant rain of small, light sparks and embers [that] flies out of the dark air and down into the crowded street, sowing a crop of glowing snow.” The wonder that the city and its life inspired in him is evident in the vibrancy of his sentences, and I have taken pains to let the vividness of his impressions enliven the prose of my translation as well.

Finally, Berlin was also a city of the theater for Walser, something he experienced both as an audience member and through his brother’s work and friends. The young author had started out dreaming of becoming an actor, even auditioning once for the celebrated Josef Kainz (who pronounced the teenage enthusiast devoid of thespian talent). Throughout his life Walser maintained his love of the stage and wrote a great deal about performances in Berlin, including both high art (“On the Russian Ballet”) and low (“Cowshed”). My favorite of his theater texts here is the one entitled “An Actor,” devoted to a lion in Berlin’s Zoological Garden; this actor is a cousin to Rilke’s famous panther.

Walser left Berlin in 1912, never to come back. His Berlin Stories offer a wonderful kaleidoscopic portrait of this city that both entranced and overwhelmed him, a mixed response that made its way into these stories—at times he describes the advent of modernism’s technologies as almost hostile. For him, city life is best perceived not from the back seat of an automobile but by walking the streets, whether first thing in the morning or late at night. These stories are records of a quite particular time and place, but also of a very unusual sensibility, one whose quizzical shaping gaze presents the city as a terra incognita of intoxicating possibility.

Best Wishes,

Susan Bernofsky

Happy 2012. We are pleased to announce that the first NYRB Classic of the year is the first complete English translation of Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, with an introduction by Daniel Kehlmann. An Ermine in Czernopol, along with Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, are available at a limited-time 25% off.

An Ermine in Czernopol

“The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is named Czernopol,” Gregor von Rezzori writes in the prelude to this major early novel, the first part of a trilogy based on the author’s childhood that would grow to include some of his finest work: the scintillating memoir The Snows of Yesteryear and the trickily titled novel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.

In An Ermine in Czernopol, the author summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together. The novel centers on the curious tragicomic fate of Tildy, an erstwhile officer in the army of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian empire. Rezzori surrounds Tildy with a host of fantastic characters, each with an unbelievable story, to engage the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears.

Read Daniel Kehlmann’s introduction

On their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide, two children, an eight-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl, are the sole survivors of a plane crash in the beautiful but harsh Australian outback. Fear pervades the novel, and is introduced in the very first sentence: “It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” With no food or clear sense of direction, they are forced to confront “the basic realities of life,” from which they had been shielded back home in Charleston, South Carolina. They encounter an Aboriginal boy who represents the complete opposite of their coddled existence and he teaches them how to survive. But can he be trusted?

Etched in arresting detail, Marshall’s adventure tale is also a parable, meditating upon the collision of civilizations and cultures and the greater themes of nature, spiritual redemption, selfless love, and mortality. Walkabout has been compared to Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, and William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions.

Walkabout, first published in 1959, was not well known until the release of Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film, though Roeg’s adaptation was a striking departure from the book. For more about the differences between the film and the book, read Lee Siegel’s introduction (pdf).

Also at a limited-time 25% discount

The Mountain Lion
By Jean Stafford
Afterword by Kathryn Davis
“It’s a terrific book, witty and smart as Stafford always was, and kind in its treatment of these two strangely irresistible children.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

A High Wind in Jamaica
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Francine Prose
A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

Rock Crystal
By Adalbert Stifter
Introduction by W.H. Auden
Translated from the German by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore
Stifter’s rapturous and enigmatic tale of village life begins with a small anecdote—one Christmas eve, a brother and sister lose their way amid snowdrifts while crossing the Alps—and opens onto vast questions of faith and destiny.

The Wall Street Journal asked 50 “friends” to recommend books that they enjoyed over the past year. Three NYRB Classics are included on that list:

Charles Mann chose Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It: “Hands-down, the novel I liked most was The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy….a fictional telling of the interactions between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. That makes it sound terrible, doesn’t it? All I can say is that it plunged me into an intensely realized other world populated by characters who seemed as alive in my mind as any fictional characters I can remember.”

Ferdinand Mount chose Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado: “For those who missed Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (1958) the first time round, I recommend the recent reissue from New York Review Books. The adventures of Sally Jay Gorce in postwar Paris have lost none of their zany zap after 50 years.”

Ahmed Rashid chose Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows:
“…a masterpiece of suffering, showing how Stalin laid the seeds for Hitler. New York Review Books has done sterling service by publishing Grossman’s books again in English after they had been out of print for many years. They include his masterpiece, Life and Fate an 800-page tome of World War II and the siege of Stalingrad. All his books were banned by Stalin.”

The Sindbad whose adventures the great Hungarian writer Gyula Krúdy recounts has very little to do with the dauntless character whose name, we are told, the Hungarian Sindbad picked out himself from the Arabian Nights, his favorite book. He could even be accused of passing under false pretences. Yes, this Sindbad is incorrigibly restless, frequently in a tight spot, and not a little wily, but he is hardly a man of action and in no sense a hero. He is not young but ageless, wandering grayhaired in a green hat across the Hungarian plains or turning up in a Carpathian mountain village when not haunting the streets of Buda and Pest.

As to Sindbad’s adventures, they are exclusively amatory. He loves women indiscriminately and pursues them indefatigably, women who often are in no less hot pursuit of him, not least because he is as fickle in love as he is passionately persuasive. And yet if Sindbad is both a lover and a liar (“When precisely did the lies begin?” he wonders at one point; there is, at all events, no end to them), he is hardly a Don Juan. He doesn’t seek to conquer and possess but to find a place in a woman’s thoughts and dreams, to exist there in a state of ongoing suspense before his or her affections drift away to attach themselves to some other object of desire. (Of course he complains bitterly and quite unreasonably about women’s faithlessness.)

Sindbad and his paramours are often seen languishing broken-hearted or on their way to drown their sorrows in the Danube, and at times it appears that these adventures are doomed to end badly and sadly for all concerned. And yet it isn’t so. Everything in these stories is a matter of regret, but in the end somehow nothing is. Everything happened long ago and is now over and lost for good, while at the same time everything comes back and goes on. (“I have never completely forgotten you,” Sindbad reassures an old flame, who responds, “You really should have given up lying by now.”) Love is nothing if not unreal, and what is a good story if not a good lie? It seems altogether appropriate that most of what happens to Sindbad in these stories happens when he is already dead, while in one he exists for several pages as a sprig of mistletoe.

Krúdy’s stories, at all events, don’t set out to describe events so much as they seek to set a mood. The mood is melancholy, languorous, worldly-wise, teasingly romantic, funny, sometimes silly. Certainly it is all Krúdy’s own. The stories are exercises in seduction. “What did Sindbad like,” “An Overnight Stay” begins. “He liked snowdrifts and women’s legs… He liked hands, hair, women’s names, voices and caresses. He liked to appear in young girls’ dreams, to court fallen women at masked balls… He liked lies, illusions, fictions and imagination.” Krúdy can strike that note, but he can also display an unsettling clarity of observation, describing “a child sitting on a low stool, apprehensively, almost fearfully watching the garden yawning with autumn” or a teacher of mathematics whose “face always smelled of cold water.”

It seems a curious coincidence that the Sindbad stories were mostly written and published in the course of World War I, when they were a great success, making Krúdy’s name and even making him some money. (Krúdy, even more of a wastrel than Sindbad, soon lost it all.) Otherworldly as Sindbad’s adventures are, one supposes they may have offered readers a refuge from the mind-boggling brutalities of the war, and yet I wonder whether they aren’t better seen as a response to the war than an escape from it. A response, in fact, not only to the war but to the explosion of modernization that preceded it (and in some sense led up to it) in the course of which Budapest became for a time the fastest-growing city in the world. The old Hungary that Sindbad haunts is an archaic world, long since destroyed by modernity, and yet it also stands as a haunting reminder that the modern world is no less condemned to destruction. And the modern world, sadly, will never have had a moment to enjoy the wasted nights and days and deliciously unproductive pastimes that lie at the heart of, as Krúdy puts it, “Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence.” Sindbad, with his endless loves and lies, has all the time in the world, and perhaps he is as intrepid a hero, and as artful a survivor, as his Arabian namesake. Krúdy’s Sindbad stories, beautifully translated by George Szirtes, find a way to outpace the forced march of what passes for life in the modern world.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics