The Tanners

The Tanners (Geschwister Tanner, 1907) is a novel by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, and his first full-length work of fiction. It follows Simon Tanner, a twenty-year-old who lives with his family and struggles with dissatisfaction over a secure and orderly life.

The novel shows the high cost of rejecting basic human needs. Simon's conflict is not simply a matter of willpower but of the gap between what one thinks and what one does.

Critics have singled out that tension as the book's central concern. When it appeared in English in 2009, Trinie Dalton wrote in Bookforum that it is really about that gap between thought and action, particularly when the gap produces disappointment.