You quickly realise that it doesn’t matter that the book has little or no plot because it is so enjoyable listening to the narrator’s intelligent, urbane, meandering musings on existence and modern life. ‘Provocatively lifeless’, that made me smile, and the narrative is full of perky, unexpectedly humorous, wry and ironic touches like that, throughout.
She was a tall, plump girl, provocatively lifeless, and he called her Leona. Ulrich’s mistress in those days was called Leontine and was a singer in a small cabaret. When a man has set his house in order, he should also take to himself a wife. The author is wryly amused by the whole world, including his characters. The Man Without Qualities is told in the third person and the narrating voice is extremely warm and humorous. This is because of the tone of voice and authorial attitude. Tone of voiceĪll of which explains why it came as a very pleasant surprise to find that, when I actually got hold of a copy and started reading it with some trepidation, The Man Without Qualities turns out to be an extremely pleasurable read. And not only notoriously long, but also notoriously meandering, with little or no plot. The Man Without Qualities is long, very long – well over 1,000 pages in the Picador paperback edition.Ĥ. So the work as a whole is both unfinished, and the structure of what exists is a little difficult to grasp (volume one contains two parts, volume two contains part three) and there exist some 20 additional chapters in various stages of completion, which may or may not be included in the printed editions you come across.ģ. Part III did not include 20 chapters withdrawn from Volume 2 of 1933 in printer’s galley proofs. Volume 1 (Part I: A Sort of Introduction and Part II: The Like of It Now Happens) and the 605-page-long and unfinished Volume 2 (Part III: Into the Millennium ( The Criminals)). In 19, Musil published his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities ( Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), in two volumes consisting of three parts, running to 1,074 pages. It is unfinished: Musil died in 1942 and, to quote Wikipedia: It is translated from 1930s German and a) all translation are imperfect and fail to capture the nuances (and pleasures) of the original (as every translator of Kafka unfailingly points out, much to the English reader’s frustration), and b) it must be in a style and phraseology which is nearly 100 years old.Ģ. Musil’s masterpiece ought to be a difficult read for at least four reasons:ġ. ( The Man Without Qualities, Volume One, chapter 8) Four problems We travel in it day and night, and do everything else in it too: shaving, eating, making love, reading books, carrying out our professional duties, as though the four walls were standing still and the uncanny thing about it is merely that the walls are travelling without our noticing it, throwing their rails out ahead like long, gropingly curving antennae, without our knowing where it is all going…
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