Novel
The Man Without Qualities
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
Robert Musil · 1930
Opening lines
Über dem Atlantik befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum; es wanderte ostwärts, einem über Rußland lagernden Maximum zu, und verriet noch nicht die Neigung, diesem nördlich auszuweichen.
There was a barometric low over the Atlantic; it was moving eastwards, towards a high lying over Russia, and did not yet show any inclination to bypass it to the north.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from projekt-gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Vienna, 1913. Ulrich, a mathematician, decides to take a year's holiday from life. In Diotima's salon, senior civil servants, industrialists and intellectuals gather: they are preparing the Parallel Campaign, which is to find the great idea worthy of the emperor's jubilee planned for 1918, and Ulrich is enlisted in it. Around him pass mistresses, the wife of a close friend, the murderer Moosbrugger and his sister Agathe.
Context
The author worked on it for some twenty years without finishing it: the first book appeared in 1930, part of the second in 1933; twenty chapters of the sequel were in proofs when the Anschluss interrupted the work, and he decided in exile to rewrite them. His widow published at her own expense, in 1943, the chapters that had remained unpublished. The book describes an Austria that its author calls Kakania and which is preparing for 1918 the jubilee of an emperor: the reader knows what the characters do not. Its unfinished state has become inseparable from the work.
Who it is for
An immense and unfinished book, more essayistic than narrative. It can be read by chapters, without having to proceed in order.
Prizes and reception
Ranked in 1999 by a jury of critics as the foremost German-language novel of the century, and placed alongside Joyce and Proust.
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