Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella

Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella

Searls, Damion
Walser, Robert

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $20.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date August 17, 2027

ISBN10: 196901007X
ISBN13: 9781969010071
Publisher: Turtle Point Press
Published: Aug 17 2027
Pages: 168
Language: English
Such a Façade, Madame, Is Odd: Late Poems and a Lost Novella is the first English translation of a lost work by the major Swiss modernist author Robert Walser, along with a selection of his late poems, most in English for the first time. The novella did appear in Walser's Collected Works under the title Diary Fragment, 1926, but it has never been published on its own (except in Spanish); translator Damion Searls notes the problem with this title, in that the work is not a diary, not a fragment, and not about 1926. What it is is a pendant to his beloved novella The Walk, though it easily stands on its own: written in Walser's famous miniscule microscript, it was recopied and reworked into a finished story. Like The Walk, A Journal of My Experiences provides a selective and very literary chronicle of Walser's daily life in Switzerland: city strolls, country outings, and encounters with various people, including his obsession with one special lady, along with various philosophical and self-reflexive flights of thought and fancy. The poems range in tone from the whimsical to the despairing and reveal the innermost concerns and workings of this singular writer's mind. Presented alongside their German-language originals, Damion Searls's translations of these late poems capture Walser's loopy rhyme schemes and manic melancholy energy in a way that has not been seen in English before. As the TLS asks of Walser's work, Are we dealing with pure literature, the vagaries of the everyday, jokes, or empty fancies? The writing is radical and elegant enough to encompass all these possibilities and many more.


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