Book Review: "Berlin Stories" by Robert Walser

Everyone knows what I like when it comes to literature: great atmosphere, heavy descriptions and simplistic stories where I can get lost in the rythym, tone and philosophies of the narrative. I like to be able to feel the story first and read about it second mainly because I enjoy the way the story is able to make me feel outside myself. There aren't many books that do that successfully nowadays and many of the books which contain that level of description and emotion are a lot older than many people like to read. Robert Wasler's Berlin Stories is one of the books that really intensifies the experience of the atmosphere. I liked this one a lot.

The first thing I liked about this book was the way it went into detail about the atmosphere as if it were taking you on a walk through different parts of Berlin. Passages that don't just give us certain landmarks of Berlin, but make us feel as if we are with the character as they move through the city, witnessing things and commenting on the way they are experiencing everything in that moment. Walser does a great job of heightening the senses here:

Statues beckon you from gardens and parks; still you keep on walking, giving everything a passing glance...That is what is so miraculous about a city: that each person’s bearing and conduct vanishes among all these thousand types, that everything is observed in passing, judgments made in an instant, and forgetting a matter of course.

The book is about a young man coming to Berlin for the first time and so, the language of the city is going to be deeply philosophical and, there is so much of it. I kept getting lost in these incredibly existential and thoughtful descriptions of what it was like to simply walk down the street and see people. When it comes to story - the young man is there to see his brother and honestly, I couldn't think of something more simplistic on which to expand upon. It works really well with the atmosphere and tone.

Another thing I liked about this book is the language of existence. A huge theme of this book is existence and what it means to simply exist as opposed to be an active participant in life. The way Walser went about this is to get the reader more involved in what the narrator is actually thinking about rather than just what they are seeing, doing and experiencing. Deep into the thoughts of the narrator, we see a man that is both trapped by his own existence and yet sees beauty in its dream-like state whilst observing the world around him:

Whatever is useless yet mysteriously beautiful – that is romantic. I love to dream about such things, and, as I see it, dreaming about them is enough. Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls...

What we have here is a deep psychological study of migration and movement to a city which is pretty much reaching a cultural pinnacle. I think that this book is highly underrated for its vast, beautiful and often incredibly dreamy descriptions of the land around the narrator. I would be very happy if more people read this book because even if you don't enjoy long descriptive writing like I do, you can still get lost in the narrator's psychological state. The idea that the narrator's psychology is the very thing he is projecting on to the sights of the world around him opens up many more doors as well.