Customer Reviews

The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

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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.

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.

When I read the old translation by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, I judged 'The Man Without Qualities' to be one of the 10 greatest novels of all time. I bought this new translation with excitement, imagining an even better version by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. As soon as the novel arrived, I started reading. After total boredom from the first 400 pages, I put it down blaming myself for this outcome. I returned to it six months later, with determination to rediscover the great novel I'd read 10 years ago. Again I was bored. Today, I opened the old translation along with the new. I searched for passages that I'd underlined with awe 10 years ago, and compared them with the new translation. Here is an example: (The old)"You people are in such a hurry. There always has to be a goal, an ideal, a programme there for you - something absolute. And what comes of it in the end is only a compromise after all, an average." versus (The new) "You and your friends - always jumping the gun. There's always got to be a supreme goal, an ideal, a programe - an absolute. Yet in the end, all that ever comes of it a compromise, some common denominator." The clarity and dramatic power of the former is replaced with soapy mush. How can Musil compete with Joyce and Proust when the new translation fails to connect to minds attuned to reading Shakespeare, Kafka, Cervantes and Tolstoy? Great literature lodges in the mind with the clarity of rhetorical force. It does not slide around like soap over marble. If you want to believe that Musil was one of the great novelists of the 20th century, then ignore the new translation and find the superior, alas incomplete, old one in a second-hand bookstore.

A book that took nearly a decade to write, of which this is but the first, smaller part: meticulous, controlled, and crafted like a Swiss watch by a highly disciplined mind formally trained in the fields of engineering, mathematics, experimental psychology, and philosophy. It is an abstract work that attacks the basic issues of modern human existence and requires that the reader furnish an intelligence and diligence to match that of the author, no small demand. Needless to say, it amply rewards that effort.

Modulated with irony and unfailing humor, circumspect and whole in its vision. Like all works of its kind, it is more valuable for the questions raised than answers found. Like most works of this stature, it is exasperating in parts, perhaps because it goes to the limit. Absolutely essential for anyone interested in this century's literature, as is Broch's The Sleepwalkers, which it complements both in form and content. I plan to read the remaining parts, no small task.

Like the infamous Proust translation by Moncrief and Kilmartin of Remembrance of Things Past, The Man Without Qualities is famous for and exists today because of the labor of the original translators.

Upon reading The Man Without Qualities I was swept up and lost in the tide of the prose, I simply could not stop reading it. Readability is something one doesn't often think of when considering classic foreign novels, one thinks of slow ponderous prose and intense philosophical repose that is dry and too descriptive. Oddly, this is what the new translation is, while the original is divergently witty and full of curiosity and clarity.

Granted, both translations contain the same thoughts, characters and themes. One cannot just toss one aside while fawning over the other. The new edition is indeed more complete a book than the old, but its sacrifice is apparent in how it carries the reader along.

Thus two excerpts: One from the old translation, and the same passage from the new.

"Perhaps not all of these people believe in that stuff about the Devil to whom one can sell one's soul; but all those who have to know something about the soul, because they draw a good income out of it as clergy, historians or artists, bear witness to the fact that it has been ruined by mathematics and that in mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine."

"Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines."

Note the differences and make your own decision. For me, the poetry and majesty of the original is lost. It is no longer clear and precise either. In updating Musil, they lost the power along the way.

To quote the original translation in summation:
"We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream."

A book that took nearly a decade to write, of which this is but the first, smaller part: meticulous, controlled, and crafted like a Swiss watch by a highly disciplined mind formally trained in the fields of engineering, mathematics, experimental psychology, and philosophy. It is an abstract work that attacks the basic issues of modern human existence and requires that the reader furnish an intelligence and diligence to match that of the author, no small demand. Needless to say, it amply rewards that effort.

Modulated with irony and unfailing humor, circumspect and whole in its vision. Like all works of its kind, it is more valuable for the questions raised than answers found. Like most works of this stature, it is exasperating in parts, perhaps because it goes to the limit. Absolutely essential for anyone interested in this century's literature, as is Broch's The Sleepwalkers, which it complements both in form and content. I plan to read the remaining parts, no small task.

Musil's book is one of the twentieth century's two masterworks-- the other being Proust's "A La Recherche." Musil and Proust are the Modernist embodiment of Adorno's dictum that the conceptually challenging artwork must also necessarily be aesthetically radical.

Musil's novel, written from at once the center (Europe) and the margins (post-World War One Austria) of the early Twentieth century, is the story of Ulrich, a brilliant young mathematician who observes Austrian high society on the eve of the First World War. Under the pretext of planning a huge anniversary party for the King, society gathers in one Diotima's salon. Musil's narrator here has good fun looking at the ideologies and social pretensions of the upper classes. Austra becomes "Kakania," and the idealistic Diotima a parody of Socrates' interlocutor in The Symposium.

Parallel to this social story is Ulrich's "inner transformation." As Ulrich becomes more and more cynical about, and detached from, the increasingly bizarre social world, he begins to undergo a transformation of mind, and to this end, moves at the end of Volume I into retreat from the world to pursue a "mystical union" of mind with his twin sister.

Musil's book-- like Proust's, and like Richardson's "Clarissa"-- takes on all themes. From social decay, inner transformation, the meaning of science and art, political satire, the dangers of technology, love, spiritual questions (here refreshingly and presciently free from being couched in Big Religions' terms) and plain old human longing, Musil deals with them all. And, like Proust and Richardson, Musil's story is ultimately a dialectic: the twin poles of social and individual transformation would, ideally, wind closer together until they fuse into one. In Proust's book this fusion is implied (it is the blending of author and narrator after the story's end) while in Richardson the synthesis is functional, but dead (Clarissa's coffin). Musil never finished his novel, perhaps fittingly-- WWI would destroy all remaining dreams of fusing European political idealism and the humanist spiritualism of the early 20th century, similar to how, seventy years later, Krzysztof Kieslowski's pan-Eurpoean vision of his "La Double Vie de Veronique" would look surreal and syrupy, destroyed by images from the Bosnian war in the mid-'90s.

Musil's writing is strangely effective even in translation. The narrator's sly sense of humour comes across pretty decently here, and the translator manages to make the book at times out-loud laughing funny.

This is essential reading. The reader who wants Big Ideas-- in the line of Proust, Richardson, Pynchon, Melville and Murakami-- will enjoy this work.

..than the usual suspects it's often compared to, aka Joyce, Proust. If you prefer intentional obscufucation, then Mr. Joyce will help. Endless descriptions of interiors, and mother anxiety seem to permeate the latter. The first few paragraphs of MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES must be among the best descriptions of time and place ever written. And the plot is interesting, as the lagging Austrian-Hungarian before WWI tries to put on a better emperor's celebration than it's huge German cousin/neighbor to the north, a gesture we can tell will be futile from the git-go. Ulrich, the main character is a well-bred 30ish man about town who is dragged into this affair,perhaps against his better judgement.In a novel this vast, there are characters to match,including a seemingly normal working man who is also a mass murderer, and the object of gossip and news...The author draws you into this vast Vienna metropolis with a steady hand, though his near-constant philosophical digressions may tend to put you to sleep at times.Still, go for it. It's one of those novels you can always return to. In fact, that's just what I've done now for 25 years, after my first reading.

It is a novel of love, sex, violence, soul-searching, and many other things. Yet, it is the type of book you can only read at small intervals, due to the way it makes you stop and reconsider some of the aspects of your life. It makes you think about life and particularlly anout your life. It may turn out to be the most influential book you have ever read. I highly recommend that read at least you read chapter 90,98, 109-121.

Oft described as one of the three most seminal works of 20th century, Modernist literature (the others being Proust's Remembrance, etc. & Joyce's Ulysses), Die Man Ohne Eigenschaften is an amazing work of literature. At the risk of being redundant, as other reviews attest to its magnificience, I shall attempt to be pithy and somewhat original in terms of these reviews.

-This work shows the absurdity of the old aristocratic system of Austria at the turn of the century, and absurdity at large as well
-the way he depicts Prussia against Austria and yet with it will shed tremendous light on the extent to which America is Prussia II
-the work has some very stimulating approaches to the question of morality, even if you study philosophy
-his theistic/agnostic/atheistic ruminations are of central significance. Reading his ruminations on God as I rode a train through Austria and sipped Kirsch was one of the most splendid moments of my journey
-The British edition is condensed into one volume, for those who prefer something more singular, although it is lacking 80 or so pages of material from the American edition
-this work IS NOT slow, difficult reading. The prose is very well crafted. his wit moves things along fantastically
-this work is highly relevant to our own times

like many of the greatest books, Musil's m. opus is often relegated to academe ... don't be part of that current.

also rec: William Gaddis' THE RECOGNITIONS