SOURCE: "Not Here to Write but to Be Mad," in The New York Times Book Review, October 24, 1982, pp. 14, 46.

In the review below, short story writer and critic DeFeo favorably assesses Walser's Selected Stories and analyzes Walser's use of characters. The critic also compares and contrasts Walser's writing style with that of Franz Kafka.

Robert Walser was a passionate walker, a writer of considerable wit, talent and originality, and for much of his later life an institutionalized madman who could be surprisingly lucid. Born in Biel, Switzerland, in 1878, Walser left school at the age of 14 and wandered from city to city, job to job. Although he produced a number of novels (four of which have survived), a book of poems, a few short dramas and over a thousand sketches and tales, and was recognized by such impressive contemporaries as Kafka, Brod, Hesse and Musil, his work went pretty much...