Amazon.com Review
Born into an affluent Austrian family in 1880, Robert Musil died penniless 62 years later, a solitary, bitter man who felt his genius had gone unrecognized. Certainly Musil's name is not nearly as well known as those of his contemporaries Marcel Proust, James Joyce, or Thomas Mann; still, the old man's shade might take some comfort in the critical and popular response his unfinished masterpiece,
The Man Without Qualities, has garnered in recent years. Its latest, 1995 translation revived interest in an author many consider one of the greatest--if least read--writers of the 20th century. Readers who want to know more about the man behind
The Man are in luck: Robert Musil's
Diaries are now available in English.
Musil was an inveterate diarist; while the German edition of his journals is comprehensive, its translator and English-language editor, Phillip Payne, has chosen to be more selective. Gone are entries that summarize or excerpt the work of other authors; those that are "unintelligible to all but Musil experts"; early drafts of works that are not of particular interest; or entries that add little of significance to our understanding of Musil's life or work. What's left, however, is more than adequate, and provides a fascinating window into the life, times, and creative process of a literary master. There are Musil's working notes to himself ("Set up at least 100 figures, the main human types in existence today: the Expressionist, the Courths-Mahler, the profiteer, the psycho-pedagogue, the disciple of Steiner, etc. Then have these figures crossing each other's paths"); comments about his world ("My generation was anti-moral or amoral because our fathers talked of morality and acted in a philistine and immoral fashion ... children today are moral, but want people to take morality seriously"); and meditations on the most private aspects of his personal life (discussing his wife, Martha, he writes, "She isn't anything that I have gained or achieved; she is something that I have become and that has become "I"). Robert Musil's Diaries are a remarkable portrait of the artist throughout his life and a standing testimony to his genius. --Alix Wilber
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In the "Posthumous Papers" section of Burton Pike's impressive two-volume edition of Musil's Man Without Qualities (1995) is a chapter titled "Agathe Finds Ulrich's Diary." One passage reads: "The notes that she took up in her hands, with many things crossed out, loosely connected and not always easily decipherable, immediately imposed a slower tempo on her passionate curiosity." This is likely to be the reaction of fans of this great Viennese modernist to his diaries. Although Musil briefly considered working these into publishable form, basically they were aide-memoires to books, a passing scene, a name, an archetype or the outlines of unrealized projects. Musil was immensely attuned to intellectual and artistic (and, to a lesser extent, political) currents, but he adapted everything to his own aesthetic, ethical system. While there are descriptions of sensory experiences (the smell of his mother's chinchilla is "a smell like snow in the air mingled with a little camphor"), there is relatively little indication of his everyday life?his days in the cafe, for example, or his chronic financial troubles. The notebooks from his early 20s are those of a young Viennese intellectual infatuated with Nietzsche and eroticism, but over time Musil matured. In 1920, he bemoans the "maliciousness of Fate that it gave Nietzsche and socialism to one and the same age," and eventually his sexual preoccupations are overshadowed by a lyrical wistfulness for "the golden 'fruit of the fig' on the white sheet.... The greenish-blue blanket beneath it. The gaslight.... The black hair on the white pillow." In this evolution, and in his relentless self-appraisal, Musil's admirers can see the evolution of a truly "ratioid" man.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
