Man without Qualities [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The last reviewer obviously does NOT appreciate Musil in any true sense. There are no "unnecessarily longwinded, only somewhat interesting, conversations" --the reader who thinks this way has definitely ignored Musil's central concept of "Essayismus," which is essential to any understanding of the book. With this "essayism" Musil strove to find the perfect balance between the antipodes of life--art and science (clearly evident in the book's style), precision and soul, intuition and logic. It is the path to Utopia.

Musil's "anti-Semitism": The last reviewer points this out as a factor which might put off some readers. This is comparable to putting an emphasis on Dostoevsky's alleged anti-Semitism--you end up missing the whole point. By the way, Musil's wife Martha was Jewish. After Hitler's rise to power, the Musils, like many other intellectuals, fled to Switzerland. I don't know where one finds any anti-Semitism in Musil.

This book is highly rewarding when given the time. Don't be turned off by the length. It is much easier to read than Joyce and Proust and can actually be a real page-turner. Anyone who gives it less than five stars is just not getting it.

This extraordinary novel, told in non-linear time and with many eddies and currents, captures the last of the "golden years" of the 19th century--technically the early 20th--when people in Vienna still clung to their traditions, their emperor, their rigid social order. A microscopic look at the middle European world before the abyss told through the viewpoint of a highly attractive and intellectual man, too individual for his time, a man, perhaps, of the future.

"The Man without Qualities" is a strange work indeed. It was left unfinished at the author's death, but nevertheless runs to well over 1,000 pages. There is very little in the way of coherent plot. The action is set in the latter part of 1913 and the early part of 1914, the last months of peace before the outbreak of World War I, and what plot there is centres upon the activities of a committee set up to explore ways of celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the accession of the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, an event which was due to occur in December 1918. In the event, of course, no celebrations for this anniversary ever took place, for two reasons. Firstly, Franz Josef was to die in 1916. Secondly, the Austro-Hungarian empire was to be swept away at the end of the war in November 1918.

The "man without qualities" of the title is Ulrich, one of the members of the committee. Ulrich is a handsome, wealthy and intelligent young man of good family, yet is described as being "without qualities" because he is bored, cynical and indifferent, dependent on the outer world to form his character. He has tried three different careers, as a soldier, engineer and mathematician, only to abandon them all, and accepts a place on the committee largely to alleviate the boredom of his existence as a wealthy layabout. In the course of the book we are introduced to the other members of the committee, such as the Prussian industrialist-intellectual Paul von Arnheim, Ulrich's idealistic, spiritually-minded cousin Diotima who becomes Arnheim's lover, and General Stumm von Bordwehr, forever trying to use the jubilee celebrations to further the interests of the Army. We also get to know a number of Ulrich's other acquaintances, including his friend Walter, his mistress Bonadea and (towards the end of the novel) his sister Agathe. Another important character is the insane murderer Moosbrugger.

Much of the early part of the book is satirical in nature, the principal targets of Musil's satire being the nature of bureaucracy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. The committee is a prime example of bureaucratic inertia, forever holding endless meetings without ever achieving anything or even agreeing on the form which the celebrations are to take. (The only character who ever seems to take any positive action is Moosbrugger, and his actions are purely evil). The Empire is renamed "Kakania", a pun on the German pronunciation of the initials K.K. (for Kaiserlich-Koeniglich, or Imperial and Royal) and the word "Kaka" meaning "excrement". "By its constitution it was liberal, but the system of government was clerical. The system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen." In one memorable passage Musil compares the Empire to a red, white and green jacket (Hungary) matched with a pair of black and yellow trousers (Austria). Like many people looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Musil saw the collapse of Austria-Hungary as something inevitable. In fact, that collapse was the product of two chance factors, the murder of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and Haig's defeat of the German armies in the autumn of 1918. Had the First World war been avoided, or had it had a different result, the Empire might have lasted much longer. We might even be celebrating this year the eighty-fifth anniversary of the accession of Emperor Otto von Habsburg.

In the latter part of the book, the tone becomes less satirical and more that of a novel of ideas. Musil introduces lengthy discourses, either in the form of conversations between his characters or passages in which he addresses the reader directly, on social, political, religious and, above all, philosophical topics. Ulrich suggests the formation of a "General Secretariat for Precision and Soul". This may seem like a joke, the yoking together of two incongruous ideas to produce an absurd effect, but in fact it reflects one of Musil's main preoccupations, the need to reconcile the rational and scientific approach to life ("precision") with the spiritual and imaginative one ("soul").

I note that most of the reviews the book has received on this page have been positive ones (fourteen out of seventeen awarded it five stars), so I find myself very much in the minority when I say that this was not a book that I enjoyed. My initial thought was to call my review "The Book without Qualities", but that would have been unfair to Musil, who was clearly a writer with many excellent qualities. Many of his philosophical discourses are fascinating ones, and my attention was frequently caught, even in the midst of passages that I otherwise found tedious, by a flash of humour, an original aphorism or brilliantly expressed thought. "Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought". "To believe with not quite complete disbelief that something-cannot-be-ruled-out has today become the basic attitude in matters of faith".

It struck me, however, that Musil's ideas, often of great interest in themselves, could have been better expressed as a series of essays rather than in the rather clumsy framework of a novel. The problem with "The Man without Qualities" is that, even allowing for the fact that it is unfinished, never seems to be going anywhere and lacks the form or structure evident in most well-written novels. Even in other unfinished novels, such as Dickens's "Edwin Drood", one can see evidence of the author's structural plan at work, just as one can see evidence of the architect's handiwork even in an unfinished building. "The Man without Qualities" resembles less a building than a vast, baroque folly, incorporating many beautiful carvings but with no discernible shape or structure.