Five Women (Verba Mundi) [Paperback]

Robert Musil (Author), Frank Kermode (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 16, 2010 | Series: Verba Mundi

The Austrian Robert Musil (1880-1942), a central figure in the modernist movement, is known primarily for his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities. But here, in these five stories stories as crucial to the understanding of The Man Without Qualities (and Musil's immense literary influence and significance) as Joyce's Dubliners is to Ulysses, he displays another face, one that is by turn extravagant, sensual, mystical, and autobiographical. As Frank Kermode notes in his preface, these stories "are elaborate attempts to use fiction for its true purposes, the discovery and regeneration of the human world." In that redefinition of fiction, Robert Musil's name is writ large.

Five Women has gone through three printings as a Godine Nonpareil book. We are now proud to reissue it as the newest edition to the Verba Mundi library of modern world literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The recent translations of The Man Without Qualities and Musil's Diaries have shown why the Austrian writer is often thought of as Germanic literature's Proust, and this newly translated English version of his five hefty stories demonstrates that the novelist's work in shorter fiction also bears his distinctive iconoclastic, bold signature. Opening the volume are a trio of tales, two of which, "Grigia" and "Tonka," investigate the sexuality of peasant women. Musil fearlessly delves into the pervasive notion of lower-class female sexuality as animal, accessible and perverse, even as he faithfully renders such women's limited social agency. "Tonka" aggressively ruptures its own moralizing, featuring an impoverished servant girl who has a liaison with a bourgeois student. The class difference between them becomes painfully obvious when Tonka gets pregnant: she withers while the student struggles with an ambivalent strain of love and a conviction that the child is not his. He is torn between pity for Tonka, whose unfaithfulness ends in tragedy, and confusion at his shaming devotion to her. In the last two stories in the collection, Musil's examination of the female erotic milieu is a high-strung foray into hysteria. In "The Perfecting of a Love," Claudine leaves her husband to visit her daughter (conceived in adultery during her first marriage), who is in boarding school in a remote village. Snowed in, she considers having an affair with a man she meets there, her thoughts a veritable witch's brew of forbidden desires. The protagonist of "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" rejects an old suitor, who visits her one last time. This story is filled with hints of incest and bestiality, but these issues simmer tensely just below the surface. Musil's cerebral style seamlessly executes his explorations of the mind/body duality, the ways society and intellectual life affect, but do not eradicate, the truth of the carnal body. His attitudes toward femininity oscillate between fear, disenchantment and adoration, and in stories written over 75 years ago, this range of perception will be tantalizing for readers who value innovative classics. (Nov.)

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Review

"In his descriptions of love affairs and especially in the portraits of women in love, Musil is truly original; in managing scenes of physical love, he has not been approached by any writer of the last fifty years." --V.S. Pritchett

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Product Details

• Paperback: 222 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine; 1 edition (July 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567920756
• ISBN-13: 978-1567920758
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,778,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction for New Readers of Musil, June 5, 2000

By 

James Cianci - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Women (Verba Mundi) (Paperback)

Robert Musil is not read much anymore; if he is known at all, it is usually through his monumental work, "The Man Without Qualities" - a piece comparable to both Joyce's "Ulysses" and Mann's "The Magic Mountain" in its complexity and elusiveness. Among the modernists, Musil is noted for his attempt to bring a sort of "mysticism" to the problems and philosophies of society; he was interested in the cacaphony of ideas which littered the modern world, drowning out the order of the past. This new collection of his short stories, previously published separately as "Unions" (1911) and "Three Women" (1924), provides an introduction to Musil for the uninitiated. As one reads these five stories (the "women"), one cannot help but notice the low hum of disorder welling beneath the surface - whether in "Grigia" with it's Poe-like ending, the retro-fairy tale of "The Lady From Portugal" or the seductive hopelessness inherent in "Tonka." These stories are set in a time and place not our own, but the reader is presented with the universal themes of love, death, and power - indeed, the very nature of our being. These works are challenging, they require effort, but ultimately they are rewarding and necessary. Musil once wrote of the "union of soul and economics" - the combination through literature of the ethereal and the real, the past and the present, the timeless and the mortal. This impressive collection is an entrance to Musil's world, to his ideas, and to a better understanding of our own condition.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Precision and Soul, June 23, 2006

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Women (Verba Mundi) (Paperback)

Musil's great gift as a writer was to be scientifically precise about ineffable states of mind, and the stories in Three Women (1924) display his talent for creating an atmosphere of metaphysical tension or 'float' out of unremarkable situations with little inherent drama. Not much happens on the surface in these stories, but Musil infuses the not-happening with so much significance that the meaning of humanity's life on earth seems to hang in the balance.

All three involve prosperous, powerful men attached to women they scarcely understand who, in the process of trying to account for that attachment, come to peace with the fact of death. Musil's interests are those of a philosopher or psychologist who's chosen art as his instrument for dissecting the human soul. The metaphors aren't as sharp and memorable as they are in The Man Without Qualities, and the irony's considerably turned down. This lets you see Musil's mystical side a little more clearly, but it also threw my picture of him out of balance--I missed his tart, satirical sense of humor.

The two stories that round out the collection are from Union (1911) and show a younger Musil working up his chops.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars flashes of genuis here and there, November 16, 2009

By 

Ingela "Ingela" (Sydney, NSW) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Five Women (Verba Mundi) (Paperback)

Some of the stories are a bit long and not so engaging but there are a few that are really brilliant. One in particular is quite haunting. This is super high end, high brow literature, but it's the real deal. I will definitely read it again.