The Walk

The Walk (Der Spaziergang) is a novella by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, first published in 1917 and substantially revised by the author in a second version from 1920, included in the collection Seeland. It recounts a walk through the outskirts of a town. The narrator, restless in his writing room, goes out into the street and lets himself be carried along by the impressions he gathers at every step.

The text unfolds as a sequence of sensory perceptions, philosophical digressions and small encounters. The narrator holds conversations of exaggerated, almost ceremonious courtesy with a bookseller, a bank clerk, a tailor and a tax official, and in several of them he plays subtle pranks that leave his interlocutors bewildered. Meanwhile he observes factories, workshops, gardens, children at play, a dog that looks fearsome but is good-natured, the dangers of traffic and the hardships of the poor. The tone shifts constantly between irony and confession, and the narrator often interrupts his story to reflect on writing itself. Toward the end, the brightness of the walk gives way to a deeper unease and a somber close that contrasts with the lightness of the earlier pages.

The work is considered one of Walser's most characteristic texts and an early example of flâneur literature, the tradition of the wanderer who observes the city without a fixed purpose. Walser was known for his long walks, which gave him rest, a view of the landscape and material for his writing. His reputation grew considerably through Christopher Middleton's English translation, published in 1957 as The Walk and Other Stories, which introduced him beyond German-speaking countries at a time when he had largely fallen into obscurity after the Second World War. Since then the book has been read as an anticipation of modernist sensibility and as a meditation on looking, literary labor, and the uneasy coexistence of irony and sincerity.