Name: The Man Without Qualities
Rating: 4.555555555555555 (18 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679767879

Robert Musil

Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation--published in two elegant volumes--is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

The Man Without Qualities

It is 1913, and Viennese high society is gripped by a mission to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist.Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything so innate as a 'character', he is effectively a man 'without qualities', a brilliant, detached observer of the spinning, racing society around him. Part satire, part visionary epic, part intellectual tour de force, The Man Without Qualities is a work of immeasurable importance.

Picador Classic

Edwin Lang

This is a very complex book. I read it slowly, as I simply had no other choice. Sometimes it’d take two or three readings to get through a rather small chapter. And yet, not once had I been tempted to put it aside, in despair or exhaustion. There is something inherently majestic about us human beings. I can see why God loves us so, and perhaps why some angels are jealous. And I think Robert Musil captures this about us in The Man Without Qualities. To Picador’s credit the paperback version I purchased from them survived intact over the seven months’ grueling read, whose binding survived one or two spectacular, and completely accidental, falls. The translator, Sophie Wilkins, did wonderful work overall though, and in my mind poetically and imaginatively captured Musil’s German, as she did near the end where Musil describes what has become of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire which I quote later on in this review. And given her skill as a translator and poet, her obvious love for Musil’s book and her intimate knowledge of Musil himself I wish it had been she who had written the introduction to this epic tale of the twilight of the Empire. Somewhat ironically, Ulrich, as the man without qualities, seems to have a lot of good qualities. He is, most definingly, ‘passionate about morality’ which for him was ‘neither conformity nor philosophical wisdom but living the fulness of infinite possibilities.’ Ulrich wants life. Having said that we meet in chapter six, Leona, a lover, who is a chanteuse in a small cabaret, tall, curvaceous and passionately and provocatively lifeless. Then, when Ulrich inadvertently becomes victim to unpremeditated assault by a small gang of thugs, a good samaritan comes to his aid. It is Bonadea, a beautiful and well-bred woman in her 30s, voluptuous but delicate and with an angelic face, a mother of two and married to a judge, and a nymphomaniac, introduced to us in a chapter entitled ‘Ulrich acquires a new mistress’, concluding with ‘two weeks later she had been his mistress for fourteen days’. This kind of thinking and phraseology defines the book, making it undoubtedly serious but with a strain of jocularity infused with an innate joy of living found again and again, most unexpectedly, oozing from its many pages. Ulrich is enamored by the complexity of life, rejecting any kind of dogmatic thinking, advocating a more open and humbly-minded approach to life, a way of living that acknowledges and appreciates life’s inherent complexity and unfathomableness. He resists that tendency to be like ‘a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance’. But by taking this stance, he becomes as his friend Walter calls him midway through the book, ‘a man without qualities’, someone who lacks an identity, and values, and has nothing for which he allows himself to become passionate about and has no sense of purpose. Ulrich though, at thirty, had already lived an enriched life, well-educated, trying a career in the military, then as an engineer making himself part of the thrill of the Industrial revolution, then as a mathematician – logician. But he always asked, what is life for really? And, what is morality? He saw science as amoral, something that didn’t advance humanity except in the most technical and transitory sense – ultimately not making humanity better except on a superficial level – and yet the treatment of feelings on the other hand seemed to be completely lacking, except in a most opinionated way, wallowing in a kind of wasteland. The setting for Man Without Qualities is 1913, just before the onset of the Great War, and Musil worked on drafts of the book from the 1920s until his death in 1952, at which point it remained unfinished. Ulrich, in his early thirties, is part I think of the lost generation, of which Ulrich seemed an intellectual part, though not on a literary level that had included Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T S Eliot and Sherwood Anderson, a generation which tried to appreciate the lasting values of life, such as communion with nature, love of women and male friendship and creativity, and like Ulrich were disillusioned with social ideals, any search for enduring values and even stoic individualism. Central to the story though is Kakania, which is what Robert Musil called the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the book. He describes the empire twice, which I quote below because of the two I loved the second description the best, and it is not an accident that Kakania rhymes with caca, a somewhat universal word suggesting excrement: 1.	Once near the beginning, in chapter eight, ‘Kakania is a country for geniuses, which is probably what brought it to its ruin’; 2.	And again, during one the last formal get-togethers at Diotima’s salon, in chapter 121, ‘the empire was really an ethnic motherland living in enforced wedlock with the State as an abused wife’. A jubilee committee, that came to be known to the public as the Parallel Campaign, is formed by Count Paul von Leinsdorf, a nobleman and one of the most respected leaders within the empire, in anticipation of 68th anniversary in 1914 celebrating the long reign of Emperor Franz (1848 to 1916), the longest running monarchy in the Hapsburg dynasty. Ulrich is the committee’s secretary, working closely with both Diotima and the Count. Through a series of soirees to further the campaign we meet the upper crust, the whole sponsored by Georg Tuzzi, a high-ranking bureaucrat within the empire, and led by his wife Diotima, Ulrich’s cousin, and dignitaries like the wealthy Paul Arnheim, with whom Diotima is infatuated (to Ulrich’s disgust), a Prussian Industrialist and munitions manufacturer, patron of the arts and author of books that Ulrich has read, dutifully, but finds superficial and pretentious. And we also meet characters like the genial army General von Stumm. He is a conservative aristocrat, an intellectual and deeply patriotic in his love for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like the Empire which existed since the 13th century (1282), he is getting old now and sick, and while still lecherous, just like the underbelly of Viennese society, he is growing increasingly impotent, himself a figure presaging the impending collapse of the empire. The Man Without Qualities seems to be a very contemporary book. The youth depicted here don’t seem too far off from our own, with their disillusionment with society and its institutions and priorities. I strongly recommend giving this book a read. I noticed what seemed to have been the influence of Robert Musil in an essay titled In Praise of Ambivalence by author Suzannah Showler and published in the Opinions section of the July 8 2023 edition of the Globe and Mail newspaper. In it she said she’s not advocating passivity and that it doesn’t mean a failure to act. She recommends instead embracing uncertainty and ‘holding it close’, shedding the need to be ‘decisive’ and appreciating ambivalence ‘as an engaged imaginative capacity to live with varying – and contradictory – visions, ideas and possibilities.’ She admits, and also admits that she might be bragging, that there is nothing she isn’t two minds about. Edwin

Vladimir

Хуан от "Бартълби и компания" е леко краен: "след Музил не се е появил нито един добър роман". но може и да е прав.

The man without qualities

Deniz Erkaradağ

The best book that I have ever read so far!

Into the Millennium, from the Posthumous Papers

The Man Without Qualities Vol. 2

JoYo

This long-awaited new translation of Musil's The Man Without Qualities is the first in English to include the core of the final unpublished chapters.

The Man Without Qualities

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