The Man Without Qualities [Paperback]

If we take it that the characteristics of 20th-century life are fatuity, doubt and confusion; the "barbaric fragmentation" of the self, where "impersonal matters . . . go into the making of personal happenings in a way that for the present eludes description"; a crisis of individual identity and collective purpose -- then it is Musil's astonishing achievement to make a comedy of all this.

The book begins with a baroque meteorological description; its first action is a car accident; the hero is first seen looking out of a window, stopwatch in hand, conducting a statistical survey of passing traffic. Can there be any doubt that it is a prophetic book about our world? Musil is us. The world of "global Austria" in 1913 and "the Parallel Action" -- the plan, in the novel, to claim 1918 for the jubilee celebrating the 70th year of the reign of the Emperor Francis Joseph before the Germans get it for Kaiser Wilhelm's 30th, made nonsense of by the intervention of World War I -- is our world of the United Nations International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and other fatuous schemes. While Musil's contemporaries Proust and Joyce chose interiority and the private world of memory, Musil is uncannily prescient about modern life, where sportsmen and criminals are indifferently idolized, where quantity sits in judgment on quality, so that an author, as Musil puts it, "must have an awful lot of like-minded readers before he can pass for an impressive thinker," where we sit and stew among "bobsled championships, tennis cups and luxury hotels along great highways, with golf course scenery and music on tap in every room." So "The Man Without Qualities" is satire; as one character says, "The man of genius is duty bound to attack." However, it is not harsh satire, nor is it sour. There is something loving about it. Musil's tone is unlike anyone else's. Partly it is the Austrian melancholy that underlies the book, the melancholy of a defunct empire, of a closed conditional: what was to happen did not. WHAT if, the novel implies, instead of expressing itself in the carnage of World War I, human folly had chosen another form? Partly it is the equable irony that plays over every character, institution and group in the book that makes reading Musil such an exquisitely flattering experience. No characters in the book escape mockery -- especially for taking themselves so seriously. All of them are skewed and partial, but none are caricatures; perhaps the book's almost complete lack of physical description plays a part here -- and yet, in spite of that, you feel you could pick them out in a lineup. They are Musil's puppets.

In his early career he wrote stories, plays and novels that had a certain popularity. But none of those prepare a reader for the expanse of "The Man Without Qualities". It took up the last two decades of his life, before he died in self-imposed exile in Switzerland in 1942, at the age of 61. It is a quite overwhelming novel, quite indeed...

A note: I do not think the recent translation compares to the original English one...it may read more breezily, but my brief comparison suggests that it loses a LOT of subtlety in trying to achieve a more colloquial, effortless, less dated narrative voice. For instance, a passage in the original English translation reading "knowledge was beginning to become unfashionable" is translated in the new as "science became outdated". Two totally different meanings, and the first is clearly closer, given the context..(in which Musil is waxing sarcastic about a silly but dangerous bourgeois "believing" fad - spookily portentious of the Hitler era). An incredibly absorbing psychological novel...if your reading time is precious...nothing will reward more deeply or stay with you longer.