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  Le Promeneur Solitaire: W. G. Sebald on Robert Walser By  February 6, 2014 Save this story This essay is adapted from a chapter of “ A Place in the Country ,” a collection of essays by W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), translated from the German by Jo Catling, which comes out next week from Random House. In these linked essays, Sebald takes up the troubled lives of five writers and one painter with the delicacy, intensity, and tone of sombre mystery for which he was known. The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. Later, after his return to Switzerland in the spring of 1913, but in truth from the very beginning, he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways. Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one...