Posthumous Papers of a Living Author [Paperback]

Robert Musil (Author), Peter Wortsman (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2006

“Peter Wortsman’s translation is splendid, succeeding better than any I’ve read in capturing this author’s unique combination of quizzical authority and austere hedonism.”—Anthony Heilbut, The New York Times Book Review

From one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century come these chiseled essays and sketches written in the 1920s. Exploratory, quirky, full of soul and humor. (Reprint of the Eridonos edition, 1987.)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed for The Man Without Qualities, a classic German novel of our century, Musil (1880-1942) published this witty collection of "posthumous" pieces in 1936. People, life, art and things are their resonant subjects. "Doors and Portals" explores these architectural openings in all their primitive and symbolic aspects: gallows, goal posts, entrances and exits denoting status or exclusion. In "Sarcophagus Cover," two ancient monuments, male and female, seem to picnic on the grass near Villa Borghese. Touching vignettes view animals humanly: pathos is wrung from the sight of a fly dying on flypaper, a baby hare torn in the chase, sheep with the "delicate skulls of martyrs," pelted, abused, lamenting in choirs. People-watching provides entertainment in "Boardinghouse Nevermore," about eccentrics at a German pension in Rome, and in "Binoculars," as the narrator peers through his window. The most intensely personal and extended is "The Blackbird," in which the narrator records his experience of war, his mother's death, his reliving of childhood. Precious miniatures wrought from canny observation and a rich sensibility, these 30 charming sketches will please a range of readers.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Best known for his novel The Man Without Qualities , Austrian writer Musil ranks among the great intellectuals of the 20th century. This work, written mostly in the Twenties and first published in 1936, is a collection of satirical stories and essays that "observe human life in the tiny traits by which it carelessly reveals itself." The translation beautifully captures the humor and sublety of the original. Musil's book will be among the first volumes in the Eridanos Library, a series that will introduce the American reader to modern classics of foreign literature heretofore unavailable in English. Highly recommended.Ulrike S. Rettig, Wellesley Coll., Wellesley, Mass.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 179 pages
• Publisher: Archipelago Books; 3rd "edition" edition (May 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976395045
• ISBN-13: 978-0976395041
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 6.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,365,160 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A collection of small gems, January 19, 1998

By 

Cynthia J. Conrad (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

This miscellany(Musillany)--of prose poems, personal and analytical essays, and one story-- actually contains some of the author's best writing. I suspect this is because he's having more fun here than in other works, particulary MWQ. His imagination, invention, intellect and wit are all bristling. His brilliance is obvious. The prose poem "Fly Paper" is a microscopic epic, and the final piece, "The Blackbird", an amazingly rigorous examination of the ineffable. I think if you like Calvino or Nabokov, you'll like this.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A minor book, January 19, 2008

By 

James Elkins (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (Paperback)

I can't agree with the five-star review. This is a minor book. It's a miscellany of very short pieces, together with some ideas for stories.

The opening piece about flies caught on flypaper is briliant, yes, but it's also one of a kind, and it's short. "Prose poems" of that sort were practiced from Goethe, Baudelaire, and Heine onward.

A piece on kitsch later in the book is trivial -- it makes fun of itself -- and its insights are not anywhere near as interesting as those of Hermann Broch or Walter Benjamin on the same subject.

The translator tells us that Musil considered the longest piece in the collection, "Blackbird," an example of "daylight mysticism" (taghelle Mystik), but it isn't that far from von Hofmannsthal or some of Poe, reined in by a twentieth-century sense of the real.

From a philosophic standpoint, the most interesting piece in the book is "Art Anniversary," a meditation on the way that art, when it is re-encountered after a period of absence, can fail to move us. But even there, "great art" is excepted -- in a brief aside, apparently cleverly by actually carelessly tacked onto the end of the essay.

For me the only interesting piece is "A Man Without Character," which the translator says, complicatedly, is "from the seed out of which the novel erupted like a magic beanstalk." (I don't see why it isn't the seed itself -- is there another text that is the actual beginning of the novel?) At any rate, there's an interesting equivocation in "A Man Without Character," between the use of "character" to denote moral strength and manliness, and "character" to denote "qualities." The former echoes the story before this one in the collection, which is a satire on manly qualities. The latter is the more interesting usage, because it prefigures (or echoes?) the novel "A Man Without Qualities." The narrator in "A Man Without Character" says "When you become a man you take on... a sexual, a national, a state, a class, a geographical character... you have a writing character, a character of the lines in your hand, of the shape of your skull..." There's a lot of potential parallels with the novel, but for some reason that escapes me, the translator says nothing more about "A Man Without Character."

These are minor, not worth the time. Read the masterpiece instead.