For years people thought that the scraps of paper that the Swiss writer Robert Walser left behind at the Herisau mental institution, where he had spent much of his adult life, were covered with a secret code. Only in 1972, sixteen years after his death, were the first writings of what is known as the "pencil area" published. It turned out that the one- to two-millimeter-high letters he had crammed onto cocktail napkins, menus, rejection letters and calendars were an abbreviated German--though one writ very, very small. Walser's penmanship was an apt metaphor: For all the Anglo-American world knew of him, he may as well have been writing in code all along.

Born in Biel, Switzerland, in 1878, Walser was a favorite of Kafka and Musil. But unlike these and other giants of European Modernism, and despite the advocacy of Susan Sontag and translators Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky, he remains little known in America. The Assistant (1908), translated by Bernofsky, is the most recent addition to Walser's works in English, which include the novels Jakob von Gunten and The Robber and the collections Masquerade, Speaking to the Rose and Selected Stories. (Another novel, The Tanner Family, will be published next year.) The Assistant is a funny, charming novel about the fall of a bourgeois family, the Toblers, and the life of Herr Tobler's assistant, Joseph. Fired for flubbing a calculation at his old job--"just another instance of mental indolence"--and dressed down as an "imposter," Joseph arrives at the Tobler home, which is called the Evening Star, for a fresh start. But it quickly becomes clear that his old friend indolence is still very much with him.

Most of Walser's oeuvre is less immediately accessible, consisting largely of feuilletons and prose sketches published in the days when newspaper editors were more adventurous. He also wrote enigmatic shorts, long descriptions of walks, bizarre one-page narratives--a man has a pumpkin for a head; a maid loses her charge--summaries of Greek tragedies, opinions, observations, novels and unclassifiable miscellany. Much of Walser's work is punctuated by meandering asides and jarring transitions. He's less of a name here than Kafka or Musil only partly because his work was translated later. The fact is, Walser's stories are opaque, sometimes ethereal, sprinkled with aimless descriptive passages whose humor may only strike you on the second or third read. You have to pay attention.

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