The Robber

The Robber is a novel by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, written around 1925 and published posthumously in 1972. Walser composed it in one of the manuscripts he wrote in a miniature abbreviated script, a smaller variant of the German Kurrent hand. The text fills 24 manuscript pages. It was found without a title and, presumably, its author never intended it for publication.

The protagonist is an idle, maladjusted man who seems to have asked the narrator to write about his life in Bern and his failures with women. The novel is full of digressions that have little to do with the plot, and its tone is generally comic. Walther Rathenau, a minister of Weimar Germany and an acquaintance of Walser, is mentioned several times, which has led scholars to date the composition to around 1922. Susan Bernofsky describes it as a mixture of love story, tragedy and farce, centred on a character who bungles his way through a series of comically traumatic adventures, and as a serious study of the modern fragmented self and the writer's role in society.

Its style is far more complex than that of Walser's earlier work: sudden shifts of perspective, metaphors stretched to comic extremes, statements that cancel one another out, and long sentences that unsettle literature's power to represent the world. W. G. Sebald considered it Walser's most rational and most daring work, a self-portrait of remarkable psychological precision. Critics have praised its wit and originality, and Bernofsky's English translation helped bring it to readers beyond the German-speaking world.