Walserian Waltzes

GAD HOLLANDER'S Walserian Waltzes is a sequence of meditations on madness, writing, death, and identity. Focusing on a character split between the first-person singular pronoun and his own name-a character who may or may not be dead and may or may not be insane, a character whose goal is to become "a self-made failure"-Hollander skillfully leads us to contemplate the paradoxical trajectories of language, the subjective and objective worlds it seems to create and destroy. Anyone looking for prose that combines the compressed and elusive qualities of poetry with the abstract resonance of philosophy will find Walserian Waltzes a richly satisfying experience.

GAD HOLLANDER has the mind of a philosopher, the heart of an artist, the language of a poet-and the literary soul of a modern-day Kafka. Walserian Waltzes takes us on an unforgettable tour through the devastated landscape of a ruined mind. The access to Perception is through a revolving door.

WALSERIAN WALTZES is neither a biography of Robert Walser, nor a Kafka-in-Queens type of displacement. It is closer to what Borges does with Don Quixote in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." This Robert Walser is/is not Robert Walser, and the oscillation between the two figures makes for a breathtaking tour de force.

-Rosmarie Waldrop, author of THE REPRODUCTION OF PROFILES and THE LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE

IN HOLLANDER'S hands language is an x-ray of an x-ray of an x-ray-yet never abolishes the actual body. Thus Walserian Waltzes is writing about writing that never turns bloodless but instead pulses with the interrogation of our own mortality. As E.M. Cioran once wrote: "To suddenly realize you have a brain-and not lose your mind over it!" It is to precisely this zone of mingled amazement and horror that Hollander transports his reader, and with as much or more mad consistency than any other contemporary writer I can think of.

-Leonard Schwartz author of WORDS BEFORE THE ARTICULATE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and editor of AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW AMERICAN POETS