Walser started out as a novelist, but he's really best known today (Jakob von Gunten aside) for his shorter works. Aufsätze was his first collection of short pieces to be published in book form. It appeared at a time (1913) when the initial success of Walser's novels had faded, and he was showing signs of losing confidence in his own abilities. This was also the moment when he moved back to Switzerland from Berlin. The book was a modest success and got rave reviews from some influential critics, including Max Brod, who also reported that Kafka had been very enthusiastic about it.

Walser chose the schoolish title "Aufsätze" in a typical self-deprecatory ploy - in fact the fifty or so pieces collected here are a mix of stories, fables, prose-poems, letters, paraphrases of Great Literature, criticism and journalistic description. Other than their length, the only obvious thing that they have in common is a subversive tendency never quite to be what they look like. When he's writing about the theatre, Walser always remembers to bring the house-lights up at some point; when he's masquerading as his patron's 12-year-old daughter he makes sure to turn the knowing naiveté just half a notch too far to be plausible; when he's writing as himself he slips in little jokes which are clearly parodies of the little jokes a self-deprecatory writer would slip in when writing about himself. Even a simple-looking account of a busy Berlin fast-food establishment manages to slip in some profound existential doubts in between the hyperbole about beer-fountains and sausage-mountains. Brod talks about Walser's style as "freedom in its highest form", the opposite of the schoolish, and it's not hard to see how he came to that conclusion - without ever quite putting aside the layer of unassuming modesty, every piece here manages to push the language out in a different direction and take you by surprise in a new way. A book to read slowly and come back to, more than once. ( )