The Man Without Qualities

I had completely forgotten that I was the one who recommended this formative book to LG. What a feather in my cap! To be honest, I am now incapable about thinking of this book or Musil without thinking of LG, and vice versa.

:) i owe you greatly. it's still such a big thing for me, that book. i have considered musil related tattoos.

you should totally research the system (of notation? symbols?) he used to organize his notebooks for 'man'.

Ha, LG, I refuse to take responsibility for any Musil-related body ink. Whenever I see reference to this book (granted probably most often on this board) I think to myself, LG got so much more out of it than I did, I should read it again. And then I see a shiny thing in the distance and forget all about it until the next time it comes up.

i have probably mentioned my failure to finish this book already on this thread

failure to finish book, failure to reread thread

i started reading this cuz i was really impressed with von rezzori and i guess musil was a big influence on his writing but:

To me, a book that changes the way you think and really dominates your thoughts

'dominatees your thoughts' is a really good way of putting it, so far it has this real immensity, physicality, it almost sort of looms. i mean not even really sure of what i think about it, because it ends up thinking for me, almost?

which translation are you reading? i really don't want to scroll back up and see how long i've been reading this for

wilkins and pike

do you find it oppressive or just boring?

Got tonka and other stories recently, not started it yet tho.

diaries are worth a look

do you find it oppressive or just boring?

kind of ... both?

it's weird, tho, i think the older translation does a more thorough job of making everything be in quotation marks -- like there's obv characters (the businessman who comes to a revelation that 'one should only expend the interest of one's soul - never the capital!') whose interior lives are plain awful, but absolutely everything is ventriloquised by this narrator or structure of feeling that puts it into that space. which is sort of aligned with but not identical to ulrich's malaise

whereas i think the new one seems closer to making it seem like there are human beings in there somewhere. i swapped halfway through and then gave up.

probably my favorite novel of all time.

anyone read Posthumous Papers of a Living Author and can recommend?

back on this. i half wonder if one of his sublimed models was de sade.

in the earlier translation the telegram runs:

"Herewith notify you of my decease of current date."

really need to finish/restart this

okay, 'into the millennium' is kind of amazing throughout

FINALLY

And the verdict?

Thinking of reading this one again soon.

So, about 2 1/2 years after getting the books (vol 1 and 2 of the new translation) and reviving this thread (as Michael Pemulis), I finally started reading Vol 1, am about 300 pages in and am absolutely loving it. Even with high expectations going in, it's managed to completely exceed them all and totally blow me away.

Törless entirely abandoned himself to their influence, for the situation in which his mind now found itself was approximately this: At schools of the kind known as the Gymnasium, at his age, one has read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and perhaps even some modern writers too, and this, having been half digested, is then written out of the system again, excreted, as it were, through the finger-tips. Roman tragedies are written, or poems, of the most sensitive lyrical kind, that go through their paces garbed in punctuation that is looped over whole pages at a time, as in delicate lace: things that are in themselves ludicrous, but which are of inestimable value in contributing to a sound development. For these associations originating outside, and these borrowed emotions, carry young people over the dangerously soft spiritual ground of the years in which they need to be of some significance to themselves and nevertheless are still too incomplete to have any real significance. Whether any residue of it is ultimately left in the one, or nothing in the other, does not matter; later each will somehow come to terms with himself, and the danger exists only in the stage of transition. If at that period one could bring a boy to see the ridiculousness of himself, the ground would give way under him, or he would plunge headlong like a somnambulist who, suddenly awaking, sees nothing but emptiness around him.

Mastery of the authoritative tone is in evidence there.

Read about his poem Isis and Orisis today and a translation in this blog about Musil

Isis and Osiris

On the foliage of stars the moon
Boy in silvery rest withdrew
And the hub of the sun's wheel soon
Turned and looked at him anew.

From the desert the red wind wails.
And the coasts are empty of sails.

And the sister quietly loosened
The sleeper's sex and devoured it.
And she gave her soft heart, the red one,
In return, and laid it upon him, upon him.

And in the dream the wound healed over.
And his sweet sex she devoured.

See how the sun thundered away
As the sleeper was shocked from sleep,
Stars swayed, like ships,
Shaking trees, if they are chained,
When the great storm begins.
See, there his brothers stormed
After the lovely thief,
And he cast his net out.
And the blue space broke,
The woods broke under her tread,
And the stars ran along in dread,
But the tender birdshouldered one
Could not be caught by anyone, no matter how fast.

Only the boy she called to at night
Finds her, when moon and sun exchange.
Of all the hundred brothers, only this one,
And he eats her heart and she eats his.

Anyone read Heimito von Doderer's The Demons, reading about it in this blog although that piece complains about criticisms of it rather than putting an argument forward for same.

I suspect it isn't v good as the good stuff does manage to stay in circulation in small but visible enough ways but I'd like to hear anyone's thoughts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03ncph0

Just found it, haven't listened..

lol er starts with some old concert.

Matthew Sweet annoys me...still wasn't expecting this book to be featured.

That broacast was good in parts: covered Kakania, the way Musil writes about women, how he used himself as a human laboratory is very true an probably much more of post-Freuian psychologist. Agathe. Loved the voice of the guy who reads the passages from the book.

As for the panel Boyd was boring, Drabble was annoying at times (I think the way this book flows from a non-fiction essayism to a fiction of sorts can be baggy and risky but its amazing how Musil pulls it off and keeps you turning pages). Blom seems to have had the longest engagement with the book by far and his comments show that.

Agree with that - I listened to this earlier this year, forget how I found it.

I thought all of them kind of got it wrong and raised really trite points apart from Blom (assuming he was the German academic.) I just think they failed to actually value it in any meaningful way whereas everything he said really showed a sense of the book as a whole and the wide range of topics it covers.

The others just seemed to say "oh it's ridiculous, this parallel campaign" - as if the book was like a short jolly satire.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/there-will-be-no-more-great-ideas/

Excellent piece - its great Blanchot (also one of my favourite novelists but he wrote differently) has written on him, must chase that.

http://enemiesproject.bigcartel.com/product/the-kakania-anthology

Looks interesting.

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2015/07/16/in-review-thought-flights-by-robert-musil/

new collecion

bought

thought about buying, then i saw the design

I'm going in!

good luck!

Cheers! loving it so far. Not sure what I expected, but this is quite surprising and contemporary and entertaining so far. Just read up to how Ulrich surprises himself by asking for clemency for the sex murderer.

I've been meaning to start this for a while: I've had the book for ages, but couldn't work out if it was complete or not, and had to lots of googling to get a look at various contents pages of various editions online.

My copy is the UK "one-volume" edition of the Wilkins/pike translation, which stops abruptly on p1130 without any explanation, leaving out all the posthumous/unpublished stuff, so I've had to order volume 2 of the US edition to get all that as well. Seems as though the publisher, Picador, could have included a page or two of explanation, instead of these stupid ads at the end for kent Haruf books I don''t want to read.

In the unlikely event the vol 2 doesn't arrived before I get up to that point, I will be making use of http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=musil+qualities+knopf&open=0&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def

My memories of bleak, scary Young Torless did not lead me to expect this to be as humourous as it is (this is not a complaint)

Link to that BBC episode xyzzzz mentioned ~2yrs ago, with download http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02twpys

Will listen to when have finished book. Forgive me for using this thread as a sort of notebook.

Shit my Dad says, Musil edition:

"Oh, I tried to read that once. Didn't get very far. I called it 'The Book Without Qualities'."

:(

This book is amazing. I see what everyone means about it taking over your thoughts: even when I'm not reading it, I'm stewing on it.

Just finished the extraordinary scene where they're watching the flasher lurking in the garden.

The transition from the end of the claustrophobic vol 2, to the weirdly sunny funeral-time with Ulrich and his sister, was great. Love the vibe between the siblings, though I have a horrible feeling about where it's going.

The only criticism I've heard of the newer version is that the language is a bit too American in the slang, but that it's otherwise excellent

― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison), Friday, October 15, 2010 3:03 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No idea what i was talking about here

Annoyingly, despite my having bought this book new, it has some nitwit's pencil scribblings every 100 pages or so, inexpertly rubbed out (taking some of the type with it): someone must have returned this copy to a bookshop after defacing it, it got returned to the publisher, and then sent to me, and because it took me 7 years to get round to reading it, it's a bit late to complain and ask for a new copy.

James Morrison for President of ILB

My memories of bleak, scary Young Torless did not lead me to expect this to be as humourous as it is (this is not a complaint)

yeah torless is so claustrophobic and brooding with violence - man without qualities is indeed really funny and often quite plainly acerbic or dry. i can see that some parts are a slog, like a few chapters at a time here and there, but it still surprises me that some people give up on it or find it a waste of time.

This book is amazing. I see what everyone means about it taking over your thoughts: even when I'm not reading it, I'm stewing on it.

this thread is probably full of me commenting to this effect but that's really how it was when i read it. i can remember reading it on public transport and being struck by some amazing insight or other, and feeling like i wanted to share it with someone as soon as i could. i worked in a bookshop when i read it and occasionally i'd end up chatting to someone who bought a thomas mann book or something vaguely similar, and be like "have you read the man without qualities" - usually if they had it was like this cult revelation.

must read it again sometime, i'd really like to have bookmarked all my favourite parts.

The blurb on the back says something along the lines of every page has some observation or description which strikes you anew, and while most blurbs are balls, this one is really true. Not bad when every page = 1100+ pages

it's so wide-ranging as well - like it's casually brilliant on so many different topics. i'd need to read it again to remember it all as it was about 2008 when i finished it, but the general stumpf chapters in particular are incredible, especially for the internet age.

love the poor old general and his aborted scheme to read all the important books, one per day

Have finished the main book, and the bonus stuff not yet arrived in post, so will have to wait a bit to read on. It's odd the way it actually seems to be building to a climax at the end, with the weight of all the read pages in your left hand and almost all the characters assembling in one place, but then it doesn't, of course. Hard to know how it ever could have an ending. I read that Musil told someone he wanted the book the end suddenly, midsentence, with a comma, and it actually almost does.

Most vivid characters at the moment as i think back on it are the general, the surprisingly sane and balanced agnes, despite her criminality, and the strange, somewhat mad clarisse, idling along and clutching at people like a deluded, messianic crab.

in a letter of 1934 to his friend the satirist Franz Blei, Musil, given his desperate personal situation and the Nazi takeover in Germany, compares his continued work on The Man without Qualities to “the diligence of a woodworm, boring through a picture frame in a house that is already ablaze”.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/biography/article729270.ece. (Paywalled)

Awesome how you finished this so fast! What's the Bonus stuff? Can you buy that as a separate vol?

Ronan - did you read Thought Flights?