Fiction Chronicle.

BERLIN STORIES By Robert Walser. New York Review Books; paper, $14. ''Let us be merry, rich, light, earnest, courteous, virtuous and well mannered,'' Walser exhorts, as if invoking a scout's oath for the well-rounded metropolitan. Add ''arch'' and ''awe-struck'' and you've mined the cheerier impulses of this troubled Swiss writer as he recorded his experiences in the Berlin of the early 1900s. These essayish ''stories,'' most appearing in English for the first time, reveal the exuberance (and, in a heart-rending coda, the defeat) of a young artist initiating himself into the glorious bustle of his adopted city. Everything is observed in language that asserts his professed posture as ''a perfumed and mincing know-it-all and write-it-all.'' To Walser, Berlin's architecture ''errs perhaps on the side of the drastic'' and theater should be ''shameless,'' since ''it must after all be reckoned among the secret pleasures of a theatergoer to be permitted to find sufficient grounds to blush.'' Having exalted the gifts of a critic friend, he mutters, ''Did you catch the undercurrent of vindictive envy?'' Not to be outdone, Walser deploys his own criticism with panache. As he derides ''the princely Homburgly nature'' of a pompous actor, you can almost hear the collection's principal translator, Susan Bernofsky, laughing into her laptop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]