The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1

by Robert Musil

Overview

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in two elegant volumes—is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679767879
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/09/1996
Series:	Vintage International , #1
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	752
Sales rank:	265,362
Product dimensions:	5.11(w) x 7.97(h) x 1.32(d)

About the Author

Robert Musil was born in 1880 in Austria and studied at the military college in Vienna and undertook an engineering degree in Brno, Czechoslovakia, before turning to psychology and philosophy doctoral studies in Berlin, where he began to write. He married Martha Marcovaldi in 1911. He fought in World War I, where he befriended Franz Kafka in Prague. Following the war, Musil returned to a literary career in Vienna and Berlin, during which time he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was the author of Five Women, The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and The Confusions of Young Torless. His works were banned by the Nazis, and he and his Jewish wife went into exile during World War II. He died of a stroke in 1942. Musil's works began to reappear in the 1950s, and his unfinished The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels.

What People are Saying About This

Thomas Mann

The Man Without Qualities is without doubt the greatest writing, linking it with the finest epic has to offer.

Editorial Reviews

This edition of Musil's classic modernist novel features the complete text in a new translation, as well as extensive supplementary material. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After nearly completing his training as an officer candidate in the Austro-Hungarian Empire's best military academies, Musil completed a degree in civil engineering at Brno and then moved to the University of Berlin, where he studied philosophy and experimental psychology. He spent most of his adult life in Vienna until emigrating to Switzerland in 1938 in flight from the Nazis. There he worked on this massive unfinished novel, which he began in the early 1920s, until he died in 1942. Set on the verge of World War I, the novel revolves around the efforts of Ulrich, the man without qualities, to find meaning in a society in which convention stifles a new era struggling to be born. Experimental in form, the novel virtually eschews plot, relying instead on character studies and essayistic passages. This new translation offers the most complete version yet to appear in English, incorporating all the material published during Musil's life (the first two books and part of the third); the end of the third book, edited by Martha Musil in 1943; and other materials from Musil's posthumous papers relating to the novel. This tighter, more naturally flowing translation is a significant improvement over the first, clearly reproducing Musil's brilliant wit atop the solid foundation of his breathtaking political, social, and psychological insight. Recommended for all literary collections.-Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.

Library Journal

It is the work of a writer of great distinction and the most interesting novel I have read for a long time. The name of Proust inevitably occurs to the mind as a parallel. -- Punch

Anthony Powell