Private Novelist Read Online Free PDF

walked into Herisau to get some lunch.
    The memorial to Walser actually had nothing to do with the Women’s Society, etc., but was placed there by his daughter, who lives now on Panorama Street in Haifa—in fact, she is Shats’ neighbor, and sometimes sees him on Saturdays at the Arab kiosk when he goes out for milk. She walks very slowly, with a cane, and he always says hello when walking up behind her, so as not to startle her. Her mother, a married Pomeranian Jew, met Robert Walser in Berlin in 1912. They were together several times in his apartment at No. 1 Spandauer Berg, Charlottenburg. By the time this book is published, she will have died, never having told anyone the secret, which she discovered while reading her mother’s diary in 1960, four years after both her mother and Robert Walser were dead.
    Robert Walser is my absolutely, totally and completely favorite writer, whose works I despair of translating, though I’m pretty pleased with my rendition of “The Cover Letter,” loose as it is. I’ve stopped recommending him to people who don’t read German. Even the snobbiest Knopf edition, with the introduction by Susan Sontag, has painful errors in first lines, and somehow everyone got the idea that he was a dark and pained expressionist, probably by seeing the misleading movie ( Institute Benjamenta ) of his uncharacteristic first novel ( Jakob von Gunten ), so that they turn his pleasing and delightful coinages into portmanteaus that remind me mostly of A Spaniard in the Works . Like Shats, he worked as a clerk and had beautiful handwriting.
    The public library in Herisau had two first editions by Walser, Jakob von Gunten and Die Rose, lying with a photograph in a glass case. They had been placed there in 1978 and never disturbed since. The photograph showed a dog belonging to the owner of Herisau’s pub. The dog’s name was Brahms. He died in 1985.
    â€œWhere’s the nearest casino?” Yigal asked the librarian. She advised him to go to Bern. He took a flyer for a weaving course off the windowsill, read several words, and dropped it in the umbrella stand as he left the library.
    As a young man, Yigal had often remembered Kafka’s assessment of the four main components of the resting mind, “Hatred, Rage, Shame, and Torture,” with a sense of their perfect appropriateness. But as Yigal had aged, he had lost the capacity for hatred. Even when he killed a man, he felt only a sort of mild disgust. His rages had become stereotyped, one so much like another, and all so like his father’s, that one day they had just stopped, choked off by the friction of tedium. He had lost all sense of shame, sometimes not looking in themirror for days at a time, and, far from torturing himself, he was likely to eat half a gallon of chocolate ice cream at a sitting. His habit of visiting casinos stemmed from a mature preference he called, by way of contrast, “Whores, Gambling, and Cocaine.” Generally it meant having a few drinks and watching people he didn’t know, but sounded better. A brief demonstration follows:

    Q. DID YOU EVER HAVE A MODEL RAILROAD ?
    A. NO, I WAS INTO WHORES, GAMBLING, AND COCAINE .

    Q . —

    I was going to write a few more questions, but suddenly it occurred to me why exactly I demand that Yigal stand around in casinos watching people: It’s because that’s what Daniel Deronda did—that’s how he met Gwendolen Harleth! He met her at a roulette table. She was drinking, and losing heavily, flushed with emotion, playing away her family’s last dime, pawning her jewels to play again—Daniel saved her. I love Daniel. I personally have seen a Swiss casino only once, from the side of the road. I’ve never met anyone who read Daniel Deronda, but the novel accounts for the regular appearance of “George Eliot Street” in the older Israeli towns.
    With the introduction of Daniel Deronda I realize I