This handsome collection of Walser's essays on art is a beautiful book qua book, with sewn pages and pasted-in reproductions of some of the pictures he discusses – it just calls out to you to pick it up and browse. Unfortunately, what Walser is saying is mostly rather banal as criticism – perhaps a better way to think about these pieces is that they are little bursts of creative writing inspired by works of art. This piece from Karl Stauffer-Bern, for instance:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Lydia_Welti.jpg
Portrait of Lydia Welti-Escher, 1886

…inspires a brief imagined dialogue between the painter and his subject (‘STAUFFER: Hate me, and act accordingly. It appears to me as if this is the path by which salvation might come to me. LYDIA: Friendship—how painful you are!’), while Manet's Olympia:

http://www.manet.org/images/gallery/olympia.jpg
Olympia, 1863

…makes him fantasise that he is trying to write while Olympia stares at him (‘“You seem so immersed in your vocation,” she said, and I nodded’). The artist he responds to most often and most feelingly is his brother, Karl Walser, several of whose pieces are reproduced here:

http://d3rde5ck80dcsn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/karl-walser-the-...
The Dream, 1903

His response to this is typical of his general tone: ‘All was soft and seemed lost. Had the woman's powers shrunk me to a manikin? The power of Woman: where, when, and how does it reign? In the eyes of men? When we are dreaming? In thought?’ To me Walser is whimsical, trivial, inconclusive and vaguely unfulfilling, and yet weirdly compelling at the same time. Often he says nothing of any relevance at all, or breaks off at random, traits that the translators in their introduction try to spin as productive eccentricity. One review of a Belgian art exhibition that he wrote for Prager Presse in 1926 just stops abruptly with the following words:

Pleased as I am to have had the opportunity to speak about a stately and beautiful artistic event, I consider myself obliged to limit myself with regard to the extensiveness of my remarks. Everything I have neglected to say can be given voice to by others.

Would have loved to see his editor's face when he saw that one come in. Overall I continue to find Walser rather overrated, but this is at least a beautiful book to hold and flick through. ( )