Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9641 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-10
• Binding: Paperback
• 1056 pages

Synopsis
Ulrich has no qualities in the sense that his self-awareness is completely divorced from his abilities. He is drawn into a project, the "Parallel Campaign", to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph's coronation in 1918.

From the Publisher
Acclaimed edition of one of our century's outstanding novels
Dazzlingly written, ferocious in its intelligence, The Man Without Qualities is one of the outstanding novels of the century, which presages our Age of Anxiety. Robert Musil was born in Austria in 1880. With the rise of Hitler in 1938 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1942. "The Man Without Qualities is one of the towering achievements of the European novel, and this edition is one of the most important publishing events of recent years" Observer; "Immensely rich and therapeutic, bristling with wit and a sly humour" Sunday Telegraph; "A great novel" Times Literary Supplement

Customer Reviews

Stunning achievement
Beautifully written and meaningful in so many ways. A must read but not an easy one.

Brilliant - if you have the stamina for it
The central character in this book, Ulrich, a modern man, wonders what to do with his life (fortunately a private income gives him various choices!). He gets drawn into elaborate and seemingly endless preparations for an event suitable to mark the 70th anniversary of the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Before long he finds himself drawn into a world of committees and their members, and this provides Musil with the opportunity to reflect (at great length) on meaning in a meaningless world.

Musil's characters are human in every sense. In addition to their commitment to their "work" (celebrating the great anniversary), they have relationships of varying depth and quality, and as they are drawn into their work, they are attracted or repelled by one another, with inevitable consequences. Musil delights in showing the hidden motives in human relationships and satirises the tendency of the most high-minded people to spiritualise basic human conflicts: extra-marital affairs have a tragic and heroic gloss put on them enabling the lovers to see themselves as participating in a high-minded tragedy rather than the usual philanderings of those who are less-exalted.

Musil digresses at length on philosophical matters and most readers will need to skim through some of the hundreds of pages where the main characters get lost in their train of thought. And of course, in the back of the readers mind is the thought that all the preparation will be brought to nought by the onset of the First World War. However, an underlying sense of humour pervades this book and there are a number of more comic characters who's antics bring light relief to what is on the whole an extremely dense narrative.

I am not sure I would recommend this book to anyone other than those who are used to reading extremely long and discursive texts. Those who enjoy reading James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust will find themselves at home here, but for others, the book will be an arduous slog through its nearly 1200 pages. Of course, it is a classic, of course it is a master-work, but if you are going to tackle this book, you will need a high level of commitment to literature.

An Incredible Life Changing Book
It will be very hard to read anything else for quite a while after this one except maybe the other duo in the 'Holy Trinity' of modern letters ie Ulysses and Proust's masterpiece.

However this outranks even them in terms of the depth and profundity on offer here,never has a book attempted to tackle head on the central,pressing questions of mankind,centrally how does one live or act in a meaningless universe? how did this 'reality' and 'order' come to be? why is there evil in the world?-BIG questions and Musil explores them amongst many others in these two volumes which many times left me reeling with the beauty of his insights into the human condition.

Some parts move slowly and sometimes even though the translation is superb,the English can get confused in some of the more ephemeral passages but these are few and far between.Martin Amis said Ulysses 'filled the sky' and I feel that this is very appropriate here,a lot else you will read will pale into insignificance beside this,beautiful and profoundly moving book.