The Man Without Qualities

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?

The bonus stuff is all in the second volume of the Pike/Burton translation, http://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Qualities-Vol-Millennium/dp/0679768025

It's 20 chapters/200 pages Musil removed from the published book at the last minute, plus about 400 pages of unfinished extra chapters, scenes, notes, etc

If one were inclined to "preview" it, one could do so at http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=64d2da654c43c543a06c53ac513a3902

i really want to reread this now. hm

i mean i feel like that desire would last ~ 100 pages but

Ha, know the feeling

I started this again. Wish me luck.

Luck!

ch wünsche dir viel Glück dabei.

Ach.
Ich wünsche dir viel Glück dabei.

(I would have just typed instead of c+p, but easier to get the umlauts the other way)

I keep meaning to retry this. I got about halfway last time. I remember I was enjoying it - think I must have got distracted by something else.

Ronan - did you read Thought Flights?

just saw this question from upthread. i have it but haven't read it yet. maybe read a few pages. need to remedy.

'The Confusions of Young Torless' is excellent, and only about 180 pages.

SHAMELESS SELF-PLUG: I used to write a great short books column for Bookslut - http://www.bookslut.com/authors.php?author=James%20Morrison - but gave up due to complete indifference from the editor.

― James Morrison, Sunday, November 9, 2008 4:48 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sick. im gonna read all of these i love short books

First impressions after roughly 100pp. The approach to story or content is extremely diffuse. The best description of the story so far might be 'some things happen'. But this diffusion is more than offset by the crisp acuity and rueful humor of the author's voice. I am carried along happily wherever Musil wishes to take me, trusting implicitly that he will take me to a place of interest, sentence by sentence.

incidentally, Musil's prose, as viewed through the lens of the translation, is purely remarkable without being striking. He doesn't form his phrases to impress you through stylistic posturing. Instead they each carry an intellectual tension that he successfully resolves over and over again, either as wit or as insight. It's pretty cool to watch him work.

Nicely put, aimless. Diffuse is the word---in 1000 pages the plot will not be much further advanced, but there is something great or lgely on each of those pages

What translation, Aimless? Anybody?

I have the Sophie Wilkins & Burton Pike translation.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/robert-musil-infinities-man-without-qualities/

This review has Hofmann saying a bunch of really nice things about Musil but its really unbalanced as a critique of translation in the sense that I have no idea why the NYRB edition is a good translation in the same way that the Archipelago edition of the Novellas is terrible. The review of the NYRB is simply puff.

Finally made up my mind to get the 2-vol, but on the way, I ran into an ad for Agathe, published in Dec. 2019. Should I get this too? Read it first?

Maybe I should wait for *all* the related material? Brian Wilson, Arthur Russell, Bolano, aieeee

Agathe is basically a carefully edited extract. Get the full thing and read it first.

Thanks. Had to call the plumber, so yet another sign that I should read all the books I have before ordering more.