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Still Small Voice

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  Books Still Small Voice The fiction of Robert Walser. By  July 30, 2007 Save this story Walser hiking in 1937, some years after he stopped writing entirely. CARL SEELIG/R. WALSER FOUNDATION/KEYSTONE In “Jakob von Gunten,” the 1909 novel by the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser, the hero adopts the motto “To be small and to stay small.” The words apply just as well to Walser himself, whose life and work played out as a relentless diminuendo. The up-and-coming young novelist of the period before the First World War, capable of producing three novels in as many years, turned to shorter forms, and saw his audience and his income dwindle gradually through the war years and the nineteen-twenties. Once a fixture of smart Berlin society, Walser exchanged the world of salons for a series of tiny furnished rooms and, finally, in 1929, a mental institution. Even his handwriting diminished; he was able to squeeze a last novel—a short one, but still—onto just twenty-four sides o...
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KẺ KÉP

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  Under Review Muriel Spark, the Double Agent A new biography claims that the novelist fabricated an origin story—but that secret codes lie at the heart of her genius. By  May 6, 2026 Spark at home in London, 1965. Photograph by Ian Berry / Magnum Save this story One weekend in 1923, in Edinburgh, Scotland, a red-headed little girl named Nita McEwen was on a walk with her parents when she saw her double. The doppelgänger was another child, walking with her own mother. Each girl stared into the mirror of the other, but kept moving. At school the next fall, the double, named Muriel Camberg, appeared in the first grade, a year below Nita, and it turned out that she lived around the corner from Nita, too, although Muriel’s street was slightly nicer. These small differences seemed important, something bitter to cut the sweet, enveloping taste of spookiness. After school, Nita lost track of her lookalike. She married young, and in her early twenties she and her husband moved to Sout...
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