The Man Without Qualities (The Man Without Qualities #1-3)

Vit Babenco

Rating: really liked it
Everyone in the world has one’s own individual attitude to the surrounding reality…

Revolutionary views? I’m afraid I must admit that I’m by no means an out-and-out opponent of revolutionary views. Short of an actual revolution, of course.

Even the outright reactionaries pretend to dig the new until the new starts breaking the old order of things… And The Man Without Qualities is groundbreaking in everything and in all directions. It practically revolutionises an outlook at the entire existing order of things…

The hospital aide clothed in lily-white, who, with the help of acids, thins out a patient’s stool in a white china dish in order to obtain a purple smear, rubbing it until the right hue rewards her attention, is already living, whether she knows it or not, in a world more open to change than is the young lady who shudders at the sight of the same stuff in the street.

Relativity and uncertainty principle rule in the world so everything depends on the vantage point and attitude of observer… And even the simplest thing is always seen by different people differently…

For the moment one begins to take anything, no matter how foolish or tasteless, seriously and puts oneself on its level, it begins to reveal a rationale of its own, the intoxicating scent of its love for itself, its innate urge to play and to please.

It’s exactly the way of the modern pop culture – it always attempts to lower any observer down to its vulgar level and to make one admire even the worst kitsch. And kitsch flourishes.

Jim Fonseca

Rating: really liked it
This book is widely regarded as a classic. The author spent twenty years writing it. There are three volumes - of which this review is of volume one, the only one that is widely read.

There are a variety of characters but little plot. The main character is 32-year-old mathematician who is actually unemployed. Like the author, Ulrich was previously a military officer and an engineer and then an unpaid professor. Wiki says his indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities"



Ulrich’s father thinks he should find some usefulness to his life, so the father uses his political influence to get his son a position on a national committee that is looking to celebrate shortly (in 1918) seventy years of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's reign. “What is true patriotism, true progress, the true Austria?” There’s much talk of blending “Austrian culture with Prussian intellectual discipline.” It’s also an opportunity for the Vienna intellectual crowd to flag its superiority over Germany, “…for the European spirit to recognize Austria as its true home!” The meetings and the give and take on this large committee (20 or more people) give the author a chance to lampoon what he saw as the decay of moral values and the silliness of nationalism.

There are a few odd characters who provide interest in the story. One is a female distant cousin of Ulrich who opens her home to host the committee meetings and, in effect, creates a salon. There’s a Prussian, “a crazy rich Jew,” who is clearly the dominant intellectual mover on the committee. This character is also accompanied by a young African man whom he brings with him almost as a ‘curiosity.’ And then there is Moosbrugger, a murderer and rapist in the news who has been convicted and condemned for the murder of a prostitute. Ulrich constantly wonders if Moosbrugger can be held responsible for his actions. Ulrich brings this topic up for discussion at the most inopportune times, sometimes making people wonder about Ulrich’s sanity.

The real value of a book like this is its philosophical insight and intellectual nuggets on essentially every page. A few examples:

“It is a fundamental characteristic of civilization that a man most profoundly mistrusts those living outside his own milieu, so that not only does the Teuton regard the Jew as an incomprehensible and inferior being , but the football-player likewise so regards the man who pays the piano.”

[With science] “We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream.”

“But in science it happens every few years that something up to then was held to be error suddenly revolutionizes all views or that an unobtrusive, despised idea becomes the ruler over a new realm of ideas; and such occurrences are not mere upheavals but lead up into the heights like Jacob’s ladder.”

“At times he felt just as though he had been born with a gift to which at present there was no function.”

“Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by locking it up into a system.”

“…a man who does great things usually does not know why. As Cromwell said: ‘A man never rises so high as when he does not know where he is going.’”

“…fame, such as is acquired by intellectual achievements, melts away with remarkable rapidity as soon as one associates with those to whom it attaches…”

“Accordingly civilization meant, for her, everything that her mind could not cope with. And hence too it had for a long time meant, first and foremost, her husband.”

“A great scientist, when he was once asked how he managed to hit upon so much that was new, replied: ‘By keeping on thinking about it.’ And indeed it may safely be said that unexpected inspirations are produced by no other means than the expectation of them.”

“He recollected Voltaire’s dictum that people use words only in order to conceal their thoughts and make use of thoughts only in order to justify their acts of injustice.”




This is not a light read, so it’s something you might read over a week or longer. As for a rating, It’s kind of a 4 but I’ll round up to 5 for its obvious intellectual ‘meat.’

Painting of a Vienna coffeehouse: The Café Griensteidl in Vienna, watercolor by Reinhold Voelkel, 1896. Photo by Getty. nu.aeon.co/images
Austrian stamp honoring the author from previews.123rf.com/images

Matt

Rating: really liked it
This book is huge in every respect. It is a culmination and at the same time marks a decisive point in my reading life. For the books from the same league as this one, the bar is now set quite high.

Musil's Ashes

In this special case I think I have to say something about the author and the way the book was published: The novel remained fragmentary. Robert Musil died of a stroke while working on the last part in April 1942. At this time he lived with his wife in exile in Switzerland near Geneva, almost penniless and nearly forgotten. Only 18 people attended his cremation before his wife scattered the ashes of her husband in a forest. His books were banned in Germany since 1933 and also in his native country Austria after the Anschluss in 1938. Although the Musils just barely came to make ends meet and had to live on charity, he continued to write on his Magnus Opus. The first volume was published in 1930. The second volume (1933) appeared only half because Musil had withdrawn a part of the manuscript, but the publisher still wanted "something" to sell. The third volume appeared posthumously in 1943, initially in a rushed version compiled by Martha Musil, which was later (November 1952) revised and updated by Musil admirer and archivist Adolf Frisé. That's the one I read. All this was possible because Robert Musil had produced an extraordinary bundle of 12,000 sheets with 100,000 notes, chapter drafts, and cross-references. Approximately 75 of the total of 270 chapters at the end of the novel are thus marked as "draft", "early draft" or "study". These chapters still carry a copyright, the rest (about 70% of the novel) don't, and are therefore to buy in many different versions, at least as an e-book, for small money. I have started with a cheap Kindle version, but then quickly switched to a hardcover (5th edition, 1960), to be able to actually read everything of this fascinating work.

The Plot

What is the book about? It's set mainly in Vienna in the period from summer 1913 to the "July crisis" in 1914. The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I. will celebrate his 70th jubilee in 1918. For this occasion, the so-called Parallel Action is started: Representatives of all social groups are expected to contribute ideas on how this festive event can be celebrated. Among this group is Ulrich, the titular man without qualities, who, after military service and studies in the fields of engineering, mathematics, philosophy and psychology, want to take a year long vacation from life, doing basically nothing. Ulrich makes a large impression on the group with his profound and philosophical thoughts. One sentence about him sums up his character (at least as far as the first part of the novel goes):

Alles, was Ulrich im Lauf der Zeit Essayismus und Möglichkeitssinn und phantastische, im Gegensatz zur pedantischen Genauigkeit genannt hatte, die Forderungen, daß man Geschichte erfinden müßte, daß man Ideen-, statt Weltgeschichte leben sollte, daß man sich dessen, was sich nie ganz verwirklichen läßt, zu bemächtigen und am Ende vielleicht so zu leben hätte, als wäre man kein Mensch, sondern bloß eine Gestalt in einem Buch, von der alles Unwesentliche fortgelassen ist, damit sich das übrige magisch zusammenschließe, – alle diese, in ihrer ungewöhnlichen Zuspitzung wirklichkeitsfeindlichen Fassungen, die seine Gedanken angenommen hatten, besaßen das Gemeinsame, daß sie auf die Wirklichkeit mit einer unverkennbaren schonungslosen Leidenschaft einwirken wollten.

Everything that Ulrich had called over time essayism and the sense of possibility, as opposed to the pedantic accuracy, the demands that you should have to invent history, that you should live ideas- rather than world-history, that you should seize which can never be quite realized, and perhaps to live at the end not like a human, but merely like a character from a book, omitted from all non-essential to ensure that the rest magically comes together, - all these, in their unusual worsening reality hostile versions that had adopted his thoughts, had this in common, that they wanted to act on reality with an unmistakable relentless passion.
[translated by me]

Ulrich's settings will change later on, after he's reunited with his long lost sister Agathe.

Style and Meta-Style

Musil's view on the early 20th century is always precise, his diction stringent, literary, and often satirical/ironic. The prose is dense in many places, which has repeatedly forced me to take brakes from reading to process the material. There is no coherent plot actually. The narrative is repeatedly interrupted and gives the impression of volatility, especially in the second part. The style is essayistic and is also called a "novel of ideas". Musil drives these things to extremes – deliberately. The search for ideas he lets the protagonists make themselves. Essayism is Ulrich's preferred form of expression, and he even says so himself. The volatility reflects the state of the society and is found as a theme in the plot. I find this approach pretty awesome, although I have to admit that readers can also be put off by it.

More themes, more people

There are so many themes in this book that it's impossible to name them all and hard to pick the right ones. Maybe it's enough if I just list the most serious terms here. Any of these topics is treated more or less in detail, whether by the characters, or in the above mentioned essay-like fashion:
Truth vs. Possibility
Lunacy vs. Normality
Ingenuity
Soul and Spirit
Science and Mysticism
Emotions, Instincts, Love
Logic and Mind
Language, Words, and the lack thereof
[Not often, but several times, etymological considerations about the respective (German) words are made. How to translate this, is beyond me.]

There is an illustrious cast of additional characters around Ulrich, representing all walks of life. Many of them I will remember for a long time: A lunatic murderer, a count, a salon lady, a Jewish banker, a Nietzscheian philosopher, an Aryan hooligan, and many more. One of my favorite characters is General Stumm von Bordwehr, who is anything but stumm (German for "mute"). I mention him, because he is, as far as I know, the only one who reappears in another book by another autor: Die Hochzeit der Einhörner (The wedding of the unicorns). The list of real people who appear in The Man Without Qualities, is also quite long: Archimedes, Strindberg, Murillo, Clausewitz, Dalai Lama, Velázquez, Swedenborg, Dostojewski, Drake, Franz von Assisi, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Homer, Balzac, van Helmont, Fichte, Goethe, Tolstoi, Stendal, Claudius, Maeterlinck, Michelangelo, Novalis, Bismarck, Rosegger, Platon, Raffael, Rilke, Emerson, Chamberlain, Lagerlöf, Freud, Mann, van Gogh, Raleigh, Zarathustra.

The Writer's workshop

Like I said, the last 30% of the novel contain merely chapters with drafts and studies (although what Musil calls a "draft", some authors would be lucky to have as a final version). I like this part of the novel for two reasons: The reader can sneak a peek at the writer's workshop. Some early drafts and studies unveil Musil's thought processes pretty clearly. This I find most fascinating. The other reason is that the actual story somehow withers. Although unintentional, this reflects the state of the pre-war society in a way. Everything kind of falls apart, but no one actually cares too much while Europe slithers into the seminal catastrophe.

In my edition there is also an addendum with additional fragments, early studies, so called "sheets of ideas", unpublished forewords, afterwords, and a short CV. Those are also very interesting to read and I even consider to buy Musil's complete work on CD-ROM, the Klagenfurter Ausgabe , which will hopefully be published this year, and will contain everything Musil has ever written and even includes facsimiles of his hand written notes.

The Magic Mountain

I don't remember how this book found me, and when I started it I had no idea what to expect. Reading this huge book was like climbing a mountain, a magic mountain as it turned out to be. There are steep sections and shallow ones, there are all kinds of things to marvel at along the way. If you don't rush it, take some brakes, breathe, you'll eventually get to the top, and the view from there is terrific. Comparing the book to a magic mountain is not accidental. I read Thomas Mann's novel not too long ago, and I liked it very much, but I have to say it pales in comparison to Musil's work, although both books have a lot in common too. Thomas Mann said about Musil in 1939:

»Es gibt keinen anderen lebenden deutschen Schriftsteller, dessen Nachruhm mir so gewiß ist.«

»There is no other living German writer whose posthumous fame is as certain to me.«
[translated by me]

Unfortunately this prophesy didn't work out for Musil. But it should have.
________________
Update 10/12/15
I just learned that work on the above mentioned Klagenfurter Ausgabe has been canceled! It's said to be replaced by an open-access-portal called Musil Online in autumn 2016.
We shall see...
________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
I found that my glasses perfectly fit over Robert Musil's head on the cover of my paperback




WHAT IT IS LIKE

For those yet to try this famous novel you can get an idea of what it’s like by putting a metal bucket over your head and getting a friend or partner or your children to bang on the bucket for thirty minutes or so using a very sophisticated spoon.

It must be a spoon encrypted with all the subtleties of psychology and indented with the complex analyses of the five major sciences and the handle should be engraved with great mathematical formulae and the coats of arms of the major aristocratic families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
To complete the demonstration the spoon banger should, during the banging, read out alternating verses of T S Eliot’s The Fire Sermon and George Formby’s hit “Why Don’t Women Like Me?”

After the suggested 30 minutes you will have got a reasonable idea, and you can then decide if you wish to proceed with reading the actual book.

Another way of putting it might be to imagine you are in a large room where hot air blowers are blowing thousands and thousands of very intellectual feathers over you, feathers which stick in your hair and clothes and tickle your nose and make you sneeze to the point where you can’t see the door anymore.

AN ATTEMPT TO PRESERVE MY SANITY

I decided early on that I would limit myself to VOLUME ONE, around 340 pages of this 1500 page unfinished work (1000 pages were published in Mr Musil’s lifetime and another 500 pages were later kindly supplied by his widow).

My dear friends, Volume One was enough for me for now. I may crack on with volume two in another ten years or so, maybe twenty. It is on my to-do list, but rather low down, between learning Sanskrit and getting a spiderweb neck tattoo.

THE ELUSIVE GOLDEN TAMARIN



So what we have here is a strange lumbering beast. There is not much story to be had, and readers have been known to gasp out loud when they turn a page to see actual dialogue on the next page. Sadly, it is as rare a sight as the golden tamarin in the forests of Brazil. So instead of plot and dialogue what we mostly have here is bucketfuls of character and deluges of musings. Pages and pages. This main guy Ulrich has a thoughtful turn of mind. He’s a rich 32 year old mathematician and we are in Vienna in 1913, just before the roof fell in on this elaborate aristocratic world he floats around in.

WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY THIS IS A NOVEL OF IDEAS

When I say that Ulrich (and the narrator) like to philosophise, I mean this kind of thing :

all moral events took place in a field of energy the constellation of which charged them with meaning, and they contained good and evil just as an atom contains the potentialities of chemical combination. They were, so to speak, what they became, and just as the one word ‘hard’ describes four quite different entities according to whether the hardness relates to love, brutality, eagerness or severity, so the significance of all moral happenings appeared to him the dependent function of others. In this manner an endless system of relationships arose in which there was no longer any such thing as independent meanings, such as in ordinary life, at a crude first approach, are ascribed to actions and qualities. In this system the seemingly solid became a porous pretext for many other meanings; what was happening became the symbol of something that was perhaps not happening but was felt through the medium of the first; and man as the quintessence of human possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his own existence, materialised as a record, a reality, and a character, confronting man in general.

If you are still reading, this massive book is the novel you have been waiting for your whole life.
But it’s not all like that, no.

WHAT THE HELL – A DEAD CAT!

Ulrich gets involved with a very dull business called the Parallel Campaign, which is a committee of great ones to celebrate the 30 year reign of Emperor Franz Joseph. Just when you are thinking “how dull is this book going to get?” Musil suddenly throws a dead cat onto the family Christmas dinner table, in the form of a guy called Moosbrugger, who is a sex murderer. Blam – just like that – in the middle of all the tinkling chandeliers and the ptarmigan brain pate we are contemplating a very gruesome crime, and the novel begins to talk about curiously modern issues. For instance, this Moosbrugger is a prototype Gary Gilmore, insisting that he be executed when the lawyers are trying to get him pardoned. And then the whole issue of diminished responsibility is debated.

This Moosbrugger part is an excellent strategy, setting off the glittering jawbreaking hoity toity parties with this hideous dose of human misery. The two realities lie side by side on the reader’s plate.

MASSIVE PATIENCE REQUIRED

I think Musil’s greatest fans would have to admit that he is asking massive patience from readers and the stuff about the committee to celebrate Austria is deadly dull. BUT there are always always glints of gold in the bleak granite, Musil suddenly breaks out a great turn of phrase or wicked one-liner. You never know when he’s going to do it! He can be really funny. He isn’t often enough for me but he can do it when he feels like it.

A great many people today feel themselves antagonistic to a great many other people.

(Yes, Robert – they do ! They do !)

the tenderer feelings of male passion are something like the snarling of a jaguar over fresh meat – he doesn’t like to be disturbed.

Walter smiled like a fakir preparing not to bat an eyelash while someone runs a hatpin through his cheeks

Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three stars in Baedecker

(that last one could almost be Raymond Chandler!)

And a summing up of our whole human dilemma :

Permit me to say that we’re in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, while the present moment is felt to be unbearable too.


STUMBLING INTO THE LIGHT

Musil’s prose is so dense at times it’s like he wanted to be the black hole of literature, sucking every subject into his novel and not letting anything out again. It’s some kind of monumental achievement, all right, but just as surely it’s not for most readers. It took me forever just to get through volume one and I humbly salute all those great readers who made it to the end.

Obviously this is a five star masterpiece but I was only intermittently in love with it, so three stars from this churlish reviewer.

Edward

Rating: really liked it
The Man Without Qualities is an unusual novel. More a work of philosophy than fiction, the Socratic interactions of its two dozen or so characters provide the framework for Musil's philosophical investigations. These conversations, deep and varied in scope, are the fat formed about the scant bones of the ineffectual Parallel Campaign. The philosophical musings are usually quite abstract and esoteric, though sometimes a little (understandably) absorbed in the specific concerns of the time. Nonetheless, this is a masterful work, and well worth reading.

However, The Man Without Qualities is not a polished or consistent book. Musil's approach to the novel is haphazard, full of diversions and distractions, and a disregard for conventional narrative structure. Even the Parallel Campaign, which is at the core of the novel, is abandoned for long intervals, and is rarely developed in any significant way. All this gives the impression that a completed Man Without Qualities would have to be several times longer than the already dense, 1100 pages of this unfinished version. However, resolutions of plot and thought being so rare within the novel, perhaps its incompleteness is perfectly aligned to its natural state. This is a complex and enigmatic novel, which defies simple analysis.

Musil was consumed by this book, which he worked on at some personal cost until his death. Being unfinished, there is some cohesive, unifying quality, which it lacks. Nonetheless Musil absolutely deserves full credit for what he has achieved; for his breadth of ambition and dedication to the ideal of producing the singular, great artistic work of which one is capable.

Violet wells

Rating: really liked it
I'm not sure how I made it to the end of this windbag of an unfinished novel. Especially given it bored me on practically every page. Musil reminds me of a fascist dictator with his megalomania, his swaddled love affair with the sound of his own voice. It's commonly referred to as a novel of ideas. Often code for a novel of talking heads bereft of plot or credible characters. I can't say there were many ideas, if any, which blasted forth a kindling of sunlight. I'm not even sure I could tell you what any of these ideas are. I thought the book's most popular quotes here might provide some illumination. The most liked on Goodreads is this - The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective."
Is that an idea that has enriched our culture? It sounds clever - Musil's greatest talent is sounding clever, at implying he has all the answers. It's also a novel hailed as a pioneering work of post-modernism. Yet architecturally it couldn't be more commonplace. Of course there is brilliance. It wouldn't be a book that's still read if there wasn't. ("For it is only criminals who presume to damage other people nowadays without the aid of philosophy.") But I'd say the brilliance occupies about fifty of the novel's 1130 pages. There's also the sense that this novel would never have been finished even had Musil lived another twenty years. As is the case with all fascist dictators I can't imagine him ever shutting up.

I now know my answer if anyone asks me what I think the most overrated novel hailed as a masterpiece is.

Tara

Rating: really liked it

“It’s all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence!”

First and foremost, I’d like to make it clear that my rating is more a reflection of my personal enjoyment of this novel than of its literary merit. Musil had a brilliant mind and a startlingly innovative writing style; I worship his Confusions of Young Törless. Also, the philosophical, psychological, and political analyses contained in this book were nothing if not rigorous, intricate and formidably incisive.

That said, although I knew going in that this would be a tremendously long “novel of ideas,” I seem to have overestimated my attention span for, and ability to appreciate, such a work. 1,774 pages of a book that tapered off excruciatingly slowly into a loose bundle of dry, esoteric philosophical discourses just wasn’t for me. In fact, to be brutally honest, slogging through the latter portion of this book was one of the most interminably tedious reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to label it pretentious intellectual bullshit, but that’s (mainly) because I’m a gutless wonder.

At any rate, I suggest you make damn sure you’re okay with a progressively plot-less philosophical novel before you commit to it, because if it isn’t really your jam, you’ll frequently be seized by an overpowering urge to run toward the nearest living thing and kill it. For “everything split into hundreds of layers and became opaque and blurred,” and more often than not, I found myself sympathizing with Cameron’s bewilderment and despair over that Seurat painting in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off :

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
An absolute classic. Sort of Dilbert but in pre-WWI Austria. This first volume is outstanding. The second one was nearly unreadable. The protagonist is tasked with organizing a massive party for the jubilee of the Austro-Hungarian emperor and the story becomes absurdist, ironic and hilarious as he confronts an apathetic administration and as everything indicates the impending doom of the regime. A must read!

James Henderson

Rating: really liked it
A comic novel. A modern novel. A novel of ideas and more. This is without a doubt my favorite novel and one that both encapsulates and foreshadows the the development of the modern condition. Musil's scientific mind is able to present a humanistic view of the world of Ulrich and the rest of the characters that inhabit this novel. Continuously inventive and invigorating for the reader, the writing is so precise and the argument Musil makes about Ulrich and his situation so intricate that it is intellectually and aesthetically involving even before it becomes emotionally so.

On rereading Musil I have come to an appreciation of why he may have found it so difficult to complete the project, for his protagonist, Ulrich - the man without qualities - was so definitely a man who considered the unlimited number of possibilities before acting. As Musil said, "What is seemingly solid in this system becomes a porous pretext for many possible meanings; . . . and man as the quintessence of his possibilities, potential man,"(p. 270); the task before him must have seemed daunting. The result - he left thousands of pages of manuscript unfinished, unedited, unpublished at his death.

At the end of the first volume of The Man Without Qualities Ulrich has just learned of his father's death and is seen heading for the train station to return home to attend to his duties. This is an ending of sorts, at least for this seven hundred page prelude to the remainder of the novel. It is a prelude that includes introductions to a roster of characters who, unlike Ulrich, portray characteristics that place them definitely in 1913 Vienna where we find most of them participating in a centennial celebration referred to as the 'Parallel Campaign'. Beside this campaign we also see glimmerings of the rise of the 'new' Germany that would emerge after the Great War which remains only, an unmentioned, possibility.

Through the whole of the first volume Ulrich both meditates internally and interacts with the other characters regarding the nature of this world and its activities and, most importantly, the possibilities facing him - the 'what if' or subjunctive nature of life. This can be summarized briefly as a discussion of the difference between the precise measurement of the modern scientific view of man and the imprecision of the artistic or more spiritual view. The society presented in the novel is particular, yet universal and in that society Ulrich is the most universal individual. As the first volume of this rather uneventful story edges toward its close suddenly several events erupt to bring some of the action into focus. These lead to a moment where Musil brings Ulrich and the reader face to face to contemplate "the narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings,". This mode of thought may give one the "impression that their life has a 'course' (that) is somehow their refuge from chaos." (p. 709) Or we may believe that it is not an impression, but a reality made through our creation of our own life through our actions and influences ("Man is not a teaching animal but one that lives, acts, and influences." - Goethe).

Kilburn Adam

Rating: really liked it
This review is for the Picador edition. translated by Shophie Wilkins and Burton Pike.

I don't know how people found books to read before the internet and Goodreads. Goodreads has been recommending me this book for a very long time. Finally I've managed to read it.

Anyway about the book:

This is posibilly the most accessible, inspiring, and influential philosophy book that I've read. It's also a novel. So it has a plot and characters. The book covers many concepts, themes, and ideas. Some of the themes include morality, experience, truth and opinion.

There are many allusions to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Which I got because I've read many of their books. But unfortunately I haven't read enough Goethe to get the allusions to him. I've only actually read Faust Part 1.

The book is supposedly incomplete. But without giving anything away. I found the ending more than adequate. Unlike the disappointing ending to other incomplete novels. Like The Castle by Franz Kafka. And Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. But like many people have said before. It's a novel of ideas so the ending isn't really that important.

I'll definitely be reading this book many times again. As there is so much to absorb. That one read really isn't sufficient enough.

If The Man Without Qualities had a fight with In Search of Lost Time. The Man Without Qualities Would kick it's ass.

Max

Rating: really liked it
I'm not one for superlatives, but this has to be the greatest novel I have ever read, hands down (even including the Brother's Karamazov - it is almost as if this book carried the former's concerns into the 20th century, evolving them in the process). The characters, situations and philosophical discussions have a level of complexity and observational depth that I have never before encountered, and at times I almost found it hard to grasp that such a work could have been written by a single human consciousness. The conflict between modern rationality and science and the less tangible subjective world of feeling, morality, art and spirituality is one that Musil truly understood and battled, and his attempt to forge a solution is admirable to say the least. Given that I just finished it, time is needed for its effect to fully sink in; I will return with more developed thoughts, but this was a truly life changing experience. The book has lost none of its relevance; at the beginning of the 21st century, we are all men without qualities..

Leo Robertson

Rating: really liked it
Here’s a song for you.

The song is ‘Bros’ by Panda Bear, maybe you’ve heard of it. Anyway, have a wee listen to it now, a minute or so (or it'll make good background music while you read this review!) Okay, fine, it’s a breezy summery song, nothing too special. But did you hear the screaming, sobbing, racecar, owl hoots, or anything else that makes up the dense collection of samples? It’s blurry, messy, no two listens are alike. You pick up on different things each time. To me at least, listening to the song is like listening to life. I have no doubt it was written by a really clever guy.

It’s this same effect that The Man Without Qualities gave me, written by a clever guy, and like reading life. Like ‘Bros’, it doesn’t really begin or end, and everything between those non-existent boundaries is a dense mess. So, quite a difficult thing to review, essentially. So you have to pick out the parts that speak to you. Back to the song for a bit, maybe you start to hear the wails, screams, animals, but then you think… is that the hiss of a snake, a match being lit, a fuse? Are those children laughing or crying? Probably depending on who you are, you catch some parts, not others, and think of them one way, and not another. This brings me on to the meaning that I applied to TMWQ. It’s about the only thing I can offer by way of a review:

Pg. 188 (maybe my favourite sentence) “Arnheim had written that a man who inspects his suit is incapable of fearless conduct, because the mirror, originally created to give pleasure-as Arnheim explained it- had become an instrument of anxiety, like the clock, which is a substitute for the fact that our activities no longer follow a logical sequence”

What I love about this is how it makes you seriously reevaluate two everyday objects and consider the influence they have upon you. Try covering up anything that wants to tell you the time (there’s a bloody lot of them), stop looking in mirrors. See what happens.

*deep breath*

Pg 328 “We can begin at once with the peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them. The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions; notes that eight or nine tenths of a human being consists of water; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic mental by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty tissue; graphs the annual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our intimate personal decisions are programmed behaviour; sees a connection between ecstasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mouth as the rectal and the oral openings at either end of the same tube- such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human illusions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favour as being impeccably scientific. Certainly they demonstrate love of truth. But surrounding this clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke, a spiteful predilection, or at least an involuntary emanation of such kind.”

Here we have the dichotomy of science as a reasoning tool, demonstrating how little it actually helps us just to live. Man cannot live by science alone.

Pg. 409 “Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them… A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o’clock as seven…. if you had never seen the moon before you’d think it was a flashlight. Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around.”

This quote best shows where Musil tries to blend mysticism with science, which I think is a brilliant idea, and something that is considered quite a contemporary movement (David Foster Wallace stating that ‘You get to choose what to worship’, or Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, all three of them are on to something).

And two instances of him referencing awesome things other people said:

Pg 386 “You know what Nietzsche says? Wanting to know for sure is like wanting to know where the ground is for your next step, mere cowardice. One has to start somewhere to act on one’s intentions, not just talk about it.”

I love this because “wanting to know where the ground is” is introduced as preposterous, not generally how it is thought of, but it is. We take for granted when we walk that there’s something there. But maybe we all live with more risk than we think. It’s correcting the attitude. Back to de Botton, this time How Proust Can Change Your Life, he argues that when you read classics, you are collecting pairs of glasses through which you see the world with different eyes. In this case, albeit not a direct Musil quote, I think you see a world with an accelerated risk all around, in every action, which makes you feel brave, since you’ve been being brave all along, just by living. I find that empowering.

Pg 1030 “The English writer Surway… distinguishes five [steps] in the process of successful reasoning: (a) close observation of an event, in which the observation immediately reveals problems of interpretation; (b) establishing such problems and defining them more narrowly; (c) hypothesis of a possible solution; (d) logically developing the consequences of this hypothesis; and (e) further observations, leading to an acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis and thereby to a successful outcome of the thinking process.”

Often all skipped.

I had no idea that this book was in part an analysis of ‘living scientifically’, but that part was clearly the most important to me. For obvious reasons, there’s not a lot of it in literature, at least that I’ve found. I think I’m supposed to be reading science fiction, but I find a lot of it- even the serious stuff- a bit cheesy and obvious, and as for how we’re supposed to live with science, unhelpful (yeah that is too much- and I still read science fiction, but mostly just for pleasure). I’m about to embark on a career in chemical engineering, and strongly believe it’s what I was meant to do. People were always born writers, singers, artists, never chemical engineers, although I went to a really interesting lecture where professors of the Medieval Studies department described us as modern day alchemists, so yes, chemical engineering is an innate calling, but up until recently we’ve just been untrained observers. I think that was my argument all along, or maybe Musil just helped me see it. But science and mysticism are knit together, you need not choose one or the other, and both may well be necessary for life satisfaction. This is what I got from The Man Without Qualities, but you can see the slant it has towards my opinion or attitude. The book is massive, perhaps you don’t agree with me or my interpretation, but you can at least see that intellectual exercise and depth that the book offers, and that’s still there for you to enjoy.

What will you see when you put on Musil’s glasses?

Katia N

Rating: really liked it
You cannot read this novel fast - you need to stop and think at almost each sentence. And this becomes quite hard work - I ended up reading with the pencil in my hand- but it is really rewarding if you are up to 1000 pages of ideas.

This novel, Proust and Ulysses are deservingly considered to be three pillars of the modernist literature of the 20th century. I have not read Ulysses yet but this novel is quite different from "In a search of a lost time". Proust investigates more the subconsciousness of people and their psychology. While Musel is more interested in the ideas and causal explanations of the reality.

In my view any book has got his optimal age when you would enjoy or benefit from it the most. For example I think to read Anna Karenina before you 30 is not to get the maximum out of the depth of the novel. You ought to have life experience to resonate with the story. Of course it is rather subjective. But in terms of this novel I regret I have not read it when I was 20 as a student at the University. Early 20s is the age when you start to rationalise the reality around yourself and try to explain it. Plus you are like sponge absorbing new knowledge and ideas. I am sure I would enjoy it even more than I enjoyed it now.

This novel is very modern and relevant today. The book can be practically split into the quotes. Here there are a few:

"There is no longer a whole man confronting a whole world only a human something moving about in a general culture medium."

"People use words only to hide their thoughts and use thoughts only to justify the wrongs they have done."

"Ideas have curious properties and one of them is that they turn into opposites when one tries to live up to them."

" In these last hundred years we've become much better acquainted with ourselves and nature and everything. But as a result the better we understand things in details the less we understand the whole. What we get is a great many more systems in order and much less order overall."

Chris Via

Rating: really liked it
Video reviews:

Playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

Part 1 - ‪https://youtu.be/KMQjElfsP_o‬
Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtE6Q...
Part 3 - https://youtu.be/9Lhtig9HHD4
Part 4a - https://youtu.be/VmAADO0HFJ8
Part 4b - https://youtu.be/THFftH8UkNo
Part 4c - https://youtu.be/PDoCmei_wUU

Nate H.

Rating: really liked it
BEST DAMN FICTION I HAVE EVER READ. And it's even unfinished. I can't imagine the finished book. Long live Herr Musil in the heavens of literature.