Robert Musil

[A Common Reader]

Robert Musil was an Austrian writer. His unfinished long novel The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels. (above from Wikipedia)

I set myself the task last year of reading The Man Without Qualities - having spent some time with Thomas Mann, this writer seemed to be a worthwhile development. The book was quite an arduous slog through its nearly 1200 pages, but I'm glad I made it to the end. At 600mm wide it takes up quite a lot of space on my shelves and I note from Wikipedia that the original work was published in two volumes.

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.

Wikipedia lists his other works as follows:



Die Verwirrungen des Z?glings T?rle? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confusions_of_Young_T%C3%B6rless) (The Confusions of Young Torless, 1906), later made into a movie Der junge T?rless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_junge_T%C3%B6rless)
Vereinigungen (1911) (Unions - a collection of two short stories)
Die Schw?rmer (1921)
Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender M?nner (1924)
Drei Frauen (1924) (Three Women - a collection of three short stories)
Nachla? zu Lebzeiten (1936) (Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - a collection of short prose pieces)
?ber die Dummheit (1937)
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Without_Qualities) (The Man Without Qualities, 1930, 1933, 1943, published in two volumes)

[Bjorn]

I read The Man Without Qualities several years ago and remember liking it a lot - not exactly a breezy read, and I'm not going to pretend that I understood every single reference, but definitely one of those books that's more than worth the effort. (In fact I still frequently quote his definition of a soul: "That which crawls away and hides whenever someone mentions algebra.")

I was actually thinking of Musil just yesterday, musing on the concept of Kakanian literature, and whether there is any such thing - that is, whether there are any common traits and themes that pop up in literature from the former Austro-Hungarian empire (Austria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, etc) and what those might be. But that's probably a separate thread that warrants some more research.

[miriring]

Hello,
It's been a while since I've read twice (!) The man without qualities by Robert Musil.
In fact I studied it in a seminar at the university.
It is one of the greatest books I've ever read and a discussion upon it mught be interesting as long as more people will join this thread.
I'll lurk here to see how things will go on.

[Eric]

Musil's magnum opus has been on my To Be Read list for a record 35 years! I hope I get round to it during my lifetime.

I think there are a lot of things that link up within the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. When I made my only visit to Budapest for a few days, after having lived a decade previously in Krak?w for a whole year, I immediately recognised common traits in the architecture.

I imagine that a study of literature written during that Empire would be very rewarding.

[Eric]

I find reviews like the following one narcissistic and self-indulgent. If I read a review about an Austrian writer's book, I am not interested in the reviewer's car, or his wife, and whether she reads Trollope. And I too can name-drop about all the books I've read. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/books/review/Queenan-t.html?_r=2&ei=5087&em=&en=260b2f930abd36c3&ex=1212292800&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

This is, in my opinion, a model for how not to write a review. I would consign the whole self-congratulatory ramble to Pseuds Corner in Private Eye.

[elcalifornio]

Joe Queenan is indeed one of the worst reviewers out there. Though he falls into the category of meta-review that the Times likes to trot out. (Kakutani is the same way, if the details are different.) The book is on my shortlist of to-be-reads (i can only find the first volume in the shops), and after seeing how little about the book this "review" was, i left it well alone. the guy is using Musil as his mid-life red car among the literary set.

[Karen]

I'm just starting Volume 1 of The Man Without Qualities, translated by Sophie Wilkins. I'll report later.

[spooooool]

I've read the book several times, and each and every time i read it i'm left thinking that Musil might be a terrible old fraud. And yet i keep reading him :)

[Karen]

I realize I have a different translation from what I thought. The one I actually have is a Picador version that says "Translated from the German and with a foreword by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser."

[Karen]

Well, there is the excuse of the holidays, and the family being home, and all, but I'm ashamed to say that I have only just finished the first volume! It is an amazing book. I'm sure I have never read anything this closely observed. Is there anything else written that's this closely observed? And it is often very funny, which I appreciated since I have to say I found it pretty slow going at times. I'm taking a break in between volumes to lighten up with some Christmas gift reading, then I'll jump back in.

[liehtzu]

I find reviews like the following one narcissistic and self-indulgent. If I read a review about an Austrian writer's book, I am not interested in the reviewer's car, or his wife, and whether she reads Trollope. And I too can name-drop about all the books I've read. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/books/review/Queenan-t.html?_r=2&ei=5087&em=&en=260b2f930abd36c3&ex=1212292800&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

This is, in my opinion, a model for how not to write a review. I would consign the whole self-congratulatory ramble to Pseuds Corner in Private Eye.

This fellow is a twerp. And he's phenomenally boring. Alas, he and his useless kind are all too common in literature and film "reviews."

The funny thing is, I like how this guy (Queenan) can read great works of literature and watch great films and manage to totally trivialize them, using them mostly to interweave (poorly usually) into one of his own stupid, worthless personal tales, sprinkled with glib remarks that indicate he read the synopsis on the back cover at best. And he gets paid to do this, usually by supposedly high-class operations like The Guardian and The New York Times. These clowns could read all the transcendent works of art ever written, or nothing at all, and the end result would be the same.

[nnyhav]

I got as far as the alternate drafts in Sophie Wilkins' [Knopf] V2 (p1300 or so); it seemed a good stopping point. (V1 was a reread after the older OUP version; Wilkins was better.) The parts published in Musil's lifetime seemed not just more polished but more substantial. The German idiom that suggests Englishing the title as 'The self-unmade man' might pertain to the book instead?

I've read what else of his has been Englished, except T?rless, but including a collection of essays and addresses not mentioned above, published as Precision and Soul (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=49749) (well worth the read); also, Three Women + Unions is available as Five Women (http://godine.com/isbn.asp?isbn=1567920756).

[Howard]

I can't really comment on the Musil, as I've had it on my TBR list for about as long as Eric has. But I think you're being really mean to Joe Queenan, who's a humorist, for God's sake, not a reviewer (at least not most of the time), and is paid to write humorous articles, and so will always use whatever subject he's writing about (whether a great work of literature or the latest piece of trash TV) as the basis for a humorous observation on his own life. For my money he's one of the best humorists around and one of the sharpest observers of the cultural scene, and I highly recommend his books, in particular Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon (published in the UK as America), which is one of the funniest books I've ever read. I certainly wouldn't go to him for incisive comments on Musil, because that's not what he's about.

[Galatea92]

I find reviews like the following one narcissistic and self-indulgent. If I read a review about an Austrian writer's book, I am not interested in the reviewer's car, or his wife, and whether she reads Trollope. And I too can name-drop about all the books I've read. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/books/review/Queenan-t.html?_r=2&ei=5087&em=&en=260b2f930abd36c3&ex=1212292800&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

This is, in my opinion, a model for how not to write a review. I would consign the whole self-congratulatory ramble to Pseuds Corner in Private Eye.

A perfect example of how not to read.

Eric, liehtzu and elcalifornio, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

As Howard has explained, and as anyone can tell just by reading the first paragraph, Joe Queenan is a humourist, not a literary critic. How any one can be offended by a humourist writing a gently humourous article, instead of a serious review, is beyond me.

And I don't know about anyone else, but I found the article quite amusing :).

[Eric]

I have to admit, Galatea and Howard, that I have not actually plucked up the stamina to make a serious attempt to read "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" in any language, but looking again at that grotesquely narcissistic review by Joe Queenan, I wonder how many people he put off reading it. He's not exactly a side-splitter or Dorothy Parker. He doesn't tickle my sense of humour. If I want humour, I can watch any number of sitcoms and films on TV, read "Private Eye", even "National Lampoon", if it still exists, or buy funny books. There's nothing "gently humorous" about sitting in front of the mirror and admiring the face of a genius smeared with sump oil.

I have been meaning to read this voluminous novel since literally about 1973! While at the University of East Anglia during that time, I remember seeing the then postgraduate student of German (now Professor of German at Royal Holloway University in London) reading this book - in German. So I still feel guilty, some 35 years later, that I have never even managed to read it in English.

One problem, as Howard points out, is that some things were published during Musil's lifetime, some not. So trying to read a definitive version as as difficult as it is with some Kafka texts.

[k2doggo]

I realize I have a different translation from what I thought. The one I actually have is a Picador version that says "Translated from the German and with a foreword by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser."

that's the one i read first. there were two problems with it--first of all, it's even more unfinished than the unfinished novel itself, since they never translated the whole of the portion that came out after musil's death, let alone all the rough drafts and attempts at endings that're included in the knopf edition...

and second, the translation is really messed-up in some places. they tend to kind of wing it and hope we won't notice that a line makes no sense. for instance the title of part 2, which the knopf one calls "pseudoreality prevails." wilkins must've looked long and hard at the german words there, and then kinda gave up and titled it "the like of it now happens."

also wilkins provided one of my favorite-ever pieces of goofy translatorese slang dialogue, when a young man is quoted saying to a young woman "holy show, leona, your bottom makes me crazy!"

even putting aside the tone of the queenan "review," it's still maddening, because he's talking about, yes, a thick book that's actually great and tremendously challenging, and making it sound as if it were an encyclopedia of jokiness. it's true that the book starts off very ironically, and continues in that vein for a while. but musil is an actual scientist (he invented a chronograph and some other stuff) who with this book is trying to discover or create a scientific basis for mysticism, what he calls "the hovering life." he makes fun of a lot of freelance proto-new-ageism that was going on at austro-hungarian dinner parties at the time, but his character Ulrich gets more and more earnest about understanding the literal basis for transfigured states--whether through music, desire, incest or madness--and by the end it's a genuine and desperate question.

maybe i shouldn't call that "the end" of the book, since the novel is unfinished. but the knopf edition provides something almost better than an ending--all those self-contradictory attempts he made to finish the book actually create an incredible modernist maze of dead-ends and and possibilities--maybe the best ending imaginable in this very very hard-to-write and almost impossible-to-conclude book.

he's no fraud, believe me.

[liehtzu]

A perfect example of how not to read.

Eric, liehtzu and elcalifornio, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

As Howard has explained, and as anyone can tell just by reading the first paragraph, Joe Queenan is a humourist, not a literary critic. How any one can be offended by a humourist writing a gently humourous article, instead of a serious review, is beyond me.

And I don't know about anyone else, but I found the article quite amusing :).

I got to ask: amusing how? I honestly went back and read the whole thing again to find where the amusement lay. Not even a grin I tell ya. Reading Musil is an excuse not to fix his car. I get it. It's not funny. I finished it, I shrugged, and that was that. But one point of yours I do agree with: the second time around I didn't get annoyed at the thing. It's just not worth the bother.

[Karen]

that's the one i read first. there were two problems with it--first of all, it's even more unfinished than the unfinished novel itself...

and second, the translation is really messed-up in some places.

I guess I'll have to decide whether or not to continue with this one. Maybe I'll put Musil on hold for a while, move on to something else and come back when the new translation falls magically into my hands. I think, at heart, that's what I want to do. And there are plenty there on the shelf, waiting for me.

Although that line you quoted "Holy show...." really is priceless.