The Man Without Qualities, 2 Volumes

Musil, Robert

Published by Coward McCann 19531954, 1953

New York. 19531954. Coward McCann. 1st American Edition. Very Good. No Dustjackets. Translated from the German by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser. 821 pages. hardcover. keywords: Europe Austria Literature Translated World Literature. DESCRIPTION - Readers expect me to tell them of life itself, not of life as it is reflected inside the heads of literature and of mankind. I am trying to give them the original. - ROBERT MUSIL, Notebooks 1932. Along the sun-spattered boulevards of Vienna in the year 1913, in its gayest cafes and greyest prisons, in its most brilliant salons and dingiest kitchens, the great Austrian writer, Robert Musil, brings the reader of The Man Without Qualities face to face with life itself. This magnificent novel justly has been compared with the best of modern masterpieces. One must turn to writers of the genius of Joyce and Proust, Stendhal and Dostoyevsky, to find a talent of equal brilliance. This volume is the first of four which will introduce this masterwork of European literature to the English-speaking world. Complete in itself, it establishes the action and introduces the major themes of the novel. Ulrich, the man without qualities, the hero of the novel, finds himself, in his early thirties, a popular young man in Viennese society. He has a firm, even rather aggressive, character; enjoys numerous love affairs; is known and liked, but can never seem to make up his mind what he wants to do or be. Largely as a result of this indecision he is roped in as secretary to the Collateral Campaign.' This campaign, designed to organize the celebration of the Emperor Franz Joseph's seventieth year of reign which will fall in 1918, is a gigantic symbol of human foolishness. All of intellectual and social Vienna is caught up in the brood of committees which the campaign begets. The reader's foreknowledge of the coming disasters of World War I, the collapse of these persons' entire way of life, produces passages of rich irony as old Austria strolls on in its pleasant, human, careless way. To stand with Ulrich as one of the most memorable characters in modern literature is Christian Moosbrugger, the gentle but insane workman whose brutal murder of a prostitute electrifies Vienna. His trial, which drags on endlessly because no one can decide whether the prisoner is mad or not, illuminates by contrast the patterns of seriousness and futility which are cast across the face of this last and fatal year of the elegant Austro-Hungarian Empire. Immense in design, profound in thought, precise in expression, and, at the same time, light, witty and alive, THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES is a striking portrait of life. Ulrich, Moosbrugger, the beautiful and idealistic Diotima, and the powerful and somehow sinister Prussian industrialist, Arnheim, are unforgettable. All of them and all their lives merging and mingling with each other, open visions of other years so that a panorama of a whole epoch is created. Musil has used his time and place - Vienna, 1913 - as the stage on which to build a view of the whole modern world in transition. He has the gift of universality which only the greatest novelists have possessed. To read THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, beautifully translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, is not only an experience of reading enjoyment at its highest and most satisfactory level, it is also an opportunity to pierce, through the eyes of genius, to the very core of the dilemma of modern life. Robert Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, on November 6,1880, the son of a successful engineer. He was educated at military academies and received a diploma in engineering from the Technical University in Brünn. Engineering, however, failed to satisfy his increasing interest in literature and the humanities. He then studied philosophy and experimental psychology at the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1908. The publication of his first novel, YOUNG TORLESS, in 1906 and its immediate recognition. Seller Inventory # z10437

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Man Without Qualities, 2 Volumes
Publisher: Coward McCann 19531954
Publication Date: 1953
Binding: hardcover
Condition: Very Good. No Dustjackets
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Edition: First Edition.