An elegant collection, with gorgeous full-color art reproductions, Looking at Pictures presents a little-known aspect of the eccentric Swiss writer’s genius. His essays consider Van Gogh, Manet, Rembrandt, Cranach, Watteau, Fragonard, Bruegel, and his own brother Karl. The pieces also discuss general topics such as the character of the artist and of the dilettante as well as the differences between painters and poets. Each piece is marked by Walser’s unique eye, his delicate sensitivity, and his very particular sensibilities—and all are touched by his magic screwball wit.
This jeweled box of a book… float[s], wonderfully, somewhere in a land between short story and criticism.
— Randy Kennedy, The New York Times
There is living flight to Walser’s art. His thinking moves shoulder to shoulder with his writing, one rarely outpacing the other. He enacts, rather than presents, his consumption of pictures.
— Esther Yi, Los Angeles Review of Books
He was the most courageous kind of eccentric, daydreaming at some doomed remove from the world yet able to conjure it up in his work, where it attains a warm and puzzling glow.
— Charlie Fox, Frieze
Singular―genius.
— Ben Lerner
Bold and idiosyncratic.
— Lydia Davis
A Paul Klee in prose, a good-humoured, sweet Beckett, Walser is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.
— Susan Sontag
Everyone who reads Walser falls in love with him.
— Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
Walser achieved a remarkable tone, in which perfect assurance and perfect ambiguity combine.
