J.M.Coetzee's piece on Robert Walser, the German speaking-Swiss writer  in The New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000 issue.
Walser, writes Coetzee, was “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author, who felt oppressed by the censorious gaze of his neighbors, by the demand for respectability."

At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered in a microscopic pencil script so difficult to read that his executor at first took them to be a diary in secret code.

Walser, according to Coetzee, is most at home in the mode of short fiction.

The Robber appears a `must read.'

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/11/02/the-genius-of-robert-walser/

Benjamin Kunkel , writing in the August 6, 2007 issue of The New Yorker (Still Small Voice, The Fiction of Robert Walser) says, “ His narrators are all ostensibly humble, courteous, and cheerful; the puzzle lies in deciding where they are speaking in earnest and where ironically.”

Mary Hawthorne (Robert Walser on Everything and Nothing, The New Yorker, March 28, 2012) writes,”  It is one of those perverse ironies of history that this most delicate, self-effacing, and marginal of writers (his books were critically well received and admired by Kafka and Walter Benjamin, among others, but they did not sell), who as a young man enrolled in a school for servants and as an old one dropped dead on Christmas Day during one of his long, solitary walks in a snowy field near the mental hospital he had for more than twenty years been confined to, attracts more readers with every passing year. His completely original voice and sensibility—a blend of sharp and always surprising observation, free-floating digression, ambiguous irony, impishness, tenderness, curiosity, and detachment, all overhung with constant, circling doubt—remain stubbornly resistant to all but ersatz imitation.”