Ash, Needle, Pencil, and a Matchstick

I have walked a great deal, and I am still walking
and every time, my steps have never been the same.

******

“The fragments of prose that I write are no more than paragraphs of a long, real story that lacks a plot. And these scenes that I have written, and will go on writing, are in my view only chapters – whether short or long – of a novel that is itself the same novel I write every day; a book about myself, which I have divided into parts and scattered fragments of varying shapes.”
Robert Walser

*****

“We can detect inside Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten features of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground as well as Rousseau’s Confessions. The novel also carries something of the traditional hero of German folk tales, the hero who sets out to confront the giant monster, overcoming the obstacles that stand in his way.

Franz Kafka, in his early days, was one of the greatest admirers of Walser’s texts. Max Brod said that Kafka used to read aloud the ironic prose passages from Walser. Moreover, characters such as Barnabas and Jeremiah and the land-surveyor ‘K.’, and the two assistants in The Castle, all took Jakob von Gunten as a model.

In truth, we can hear the echo of Robert Walser’s voice resonating strongly in Kafka’s room, especially in connection with the syntactic construction of sentences and the deliberate parenthetical phrases.”
J. M. Coetzee