The Man without Qualities

Two essays will help give you an idea of the scope of this immense two tome empire of a book: V. S Pritchett's "A Viennese" and Sven Birkett's "Robert Musil" available in his essay collection Artificial Wilderness(which is a great book on 20th Cent. Europeans). I have never finished this book but reread underlined portions of it now and then to remind me of my first contact and impression of this book which was one of amazement that such a book exists. Once you have met Musil and listened to him speak through his magnificent minded creation Ulrich you will not forget him. Ulrich is like no other character in fiction. You get a cast of odd creations and rigorous Ulrich's Austrian analysis following them all around like some on the spot historian documenting the Austrian Empire in its days of decline and it is all quite entertaining. It does wear you out pretty quick though. His shorter fiction(especially "Blackbird") is good too as well as his one other novel Young Torless but nothing prepares you for this. A more challenging and intelligent entertainment I have not yet found. His diaries are also available, though I can't imagine someone finishing Man Without Qualites and then running out to pick them up.

Like Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", this immense book aims at giving an overview of the ideas of its time. Musil is a more precise thinker and stylist than Mann, and "The Man Without Qualities" has a lot more to offer than Mann's book. There are two opposing tendencies in the novel: On the one hand, Musil offers a highly entertaining satirical portrait of Austria-Hungary right before the First World War. His detached hero Ulrich meets all kinds of bizarre people, who happen to be members of the ruling class of the country. Like a vivisecteur, Ulrich analyzes the philosophies and ideologies of his time. On the other hand, he dreams of a kind of new mysticism, an emotional purity that is opposed to the dross surrounding him; together with his sister he embarks on quest for "the other state of being". Musil never finished the novel, he died before he could achieve a conclusion; which may have been impossible anyway. This gigantic torso of a novel is arguably the greatest novel of the century. I have not yet come across anything that could rival it. Musil's prose is so precise that after reading a few pages you feel that your mind has been refreshed and cleared. This is not a novel to be read in a few days, but even if you never manage to finish it, you will always come back to it.

Musil is a great writer. He is more adept than any other writer I know at conveying complex ideas, and keeping the reader hooked. I read this book is three days, non-stop. My eyes were riveted to the page like magnets. The story is very well constructed; it never becomes dense or exasperating. I don't know where Musil found the wherewithal, but this book ostensibly contains everything that had ever crossed his mind: it is jam-packed with eclectic ideas, obscure erudition, and mysticism. And it is unremmitingly interesting, too. So, don't listen to that pedant who dismissed this book because it doesn't show off like he does: read this book. It will give you quite a kick.

No doubt the book is a little draggy and you can glean a lot of what Musil wants to say in his earlier more tightly written work. But, read this work (I've read this work twice) with the unpublished posthumous papers and you will get a feel of the vast scale of this masterpiece. If Musil had lived to complete this masterwork the way it would have inveitably turned out, it would have been the greatest novel of the century. It would have been the consummation of European thought of several centuries placed in context of both the first and second world wars...now that's something to think about.

I've only gotten through volume l and part of volume ll (so far). I agree that I find it incredible that Musil is not as well known as Proust...he's his equal as a writer and in my opinion a much finer thinker. The brilliance of the book is in the extended introspections rather than the events...the multi-page musings on the human condition illustrate the timeless aspects of what we conceitedly think of as our "post-modern" psychic quandry. In common with Proust we are inside the protagonist's head, but in the third rather than first person, which gives the experience a different feel...we're a little outside at the same time. It's a ghostlier sort of connection, but I think equally as immediate. We walk the streets of Vienna as vividly as Chambray, but, perhaps Ullrich's less romantic nature, I find him a better correspondent. His perceptions are intellectual rather than the sensual, and yet, experiencing that intellect is a sensual experience for the reader (at least for this one!)A note: I do not think the recent translation compares to the original English one...it may read more breezily, but my brief comparison suggests that it loses a LOT of subtlety in trying to achieve a more colloquial, effortless, less dated narrative voice. For instance, a passage in the original English translation reading "knowledge was beginning to become unfashionable" is translated in the new as "science became outdated". Two totally different meanings, and the first is clearly closer, given the context..(in which Musil is waxing sarcastic about a silly but dangerous bourgeois "believing" fad - spookily portentious of the Hitler era). An incredibly absorbing psychological novel...if your reading time is precious...nothing will reward more deeply or stay with you longer.