Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. We’d love your help. The word does better service to the unreal communications. So the War Ministry can sit back and serenely wait the next mass catastrophe.”, Musil's continuation of 'The Man Without Qualities' takes us even deeper into the turn of the century continental psyche. UPDATE: new article about Musil, great read! Translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins. 367 pp. Describing Musil’s writing is a challenge in itself. “If mankind could dream collectively [als Ganzes],” Ulrich reflects, “it would dream Moosbrugger.” Ulrich flirts with trying to get Moosbrugger acquitted, and the increasingly deranged Clarisse becomes obsessed with him: “the murderer,” she exclaims, “is musical!” In Moosbrugger, Clarisse envisions the eruption of a transforming violence that would sweep away the detritus of her frustrated, rudderless existence. His own greatest novels (The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus) certainly answer to that description, as do many other classics of modernism. It’s rare that a debut novel gets the kind of love and attention that Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, which spanned centuries and continents, received. That is, at the beginning it was engaging and interesting, and unlike anything I'd read. I started feeling like I needed to go read up on the Hapsburg Empire and on pre-War Europe in general. We also get closer to the murderer and rapist, Moosbrugger. Yet this literature still preserves the elaborate, detailed, microscopically correct image of an imperial civilization; that it crumbles to pieces in the hands of the translator is but a sign of its original fineness. If you love the fantasy genre, this is the season for you! Like those other novels, The Man Without Qualities is a book of weighty seriousness and deep erudition. Welcome back. Plato—to take him as an example, because he, among a dozen others, is commonly referred to as one of the greatest thinkers—would, if he were still alive, quite definitely be enchanted with that world of ‘news’ in which every day a new idea can be created, exchanged for another, or refined, in which a mass of reports comes pouring in from all the ends of the earth, at a speed he never dreamt of, and where a staff of demiurges waits in readiness to test it all immediately for the quantity of reason and reality it contains. In some ways reminiscent of Mann's The Magic Mountain, here the delusions of historical intervention into an ideology of progress are a key focus. The Man Without Qualities is a Modernist masterpiece. Not that translating Musil is an easy task. Niteliksiz Adam 3'te de Paralel Faaliyet devam ediyor ancak Ulrich babasının ölümüyle gittiği baba evinde çocukluğundan beri görmediği kız kardeşi Agethe ile karşılaşıyor. It was also the perfect repository for Musil’s wicked sense of humor. It is a pity that the author has not known, after all these years of work, to give a rigid and finished framework to this novel which nevertheless bears the mark of genius. Its very title is misleading in translation. Simply, I want to be alone with my thoughts. Clarisse “had considered Walter a genius since she was fifteen, because she had always intended to marry only a genius. Not only does Musil mock Old Austria by holding it up to the mirror of Ulrich’s intelligence; he mocks his hero by holding him up to his, Musil’s, intellectual standards. ” Words can do much, but there are things beyond words.” – Sophie Wilkins At one point, Ulrich confides, “I believe that all our moral injunctions are concessions to a society of savages.” In fact, it is only by heeding our moral injunctions that we may be preserved from savagery. Be the first to ask a question about The Man Without Qualities. Door die ingewikkeldheid bleek 50-100 bladzijden per dag voor mij echt een maximum: je moet er dus veel tijd voor nemen en ruimte voor vrijmaken, want anders haal je de 1400 echt nooit. The Sophie Wilkins version is perfect and succinct while the other one seems to me a cobbled mess. Niettemin is het heel begrijpelijk waarom "De man zonder eigenschappen" niet heel veel lezers kent: het boek is enorm dik (bijna 1400 bladzijden), het is onvoltooid en incompleet (Musil ging doo. These are simply my aesthetic views and preferences as someone who has read well over a thousand pages of Musil in translation. I'm not so sure he's engaging enough to be considered Pynchon-on-the-Danube, but he's certainly more fun to read than Proust. The possibilites that Musil postulates through the character of Ulrich are awe-inspiring--his attack on every single way we live our lives is shocking, yet completely reasonable--but ultimately, the abstractness of these solutions cannot uphold the corporeality of an actual human life, and despite the apparent overused and scarred nature of every path that seems to stretch out befor. I often find that the translation you choose can have a profound effect on your experience of reading a book and I do tend to ‘shop around’ if I can. I reduced to waiting for small nuggets of brilliant writing, which. But really, it's just quite different. Throughout the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, the Parallel Campaign is the scaffolding upon which Musil hangs his tale and parades his motley cast of characters. Especially impressive is the way that he weaves these reflections into his narrative, adjusting their resonance and implication to each character, and, finally, showing how the passion for reason was powerless to save Kakania from the great irrationality that was poised to engulf it. All these ideas were animated and elevated and entangled in the first volume by consistently robust/deepening characterization and a bit of plot tension and old-fashioned love/power intrigue among the characters, but all that pretty much comes to a halt in Volume II -- characterization ceases or at most functions to remind you what's already been established, and there's really no tension except whether or not Ulrich and his sister Agathe are gonna make out. There is more on a single page of this masterpiece than most novels hold in their entireties. Here, the main story line is the one between Ul. The Sophie Wilkins translation reads: Meaning no offence, but dogs prefer a busy street corner to a lonely cliff for their calls of nature, so why should human beings who feel the higher urge to leave their names behind choose a cliff that is obviously unfrequented? Be that as it may, in addition to the twenty chapters in half-corrected galley proof, there exist dozens of draft chapters as well as voluminous notes, character sketches, alternative chapters, and miscellaneous jottings related to the book. Life has stopped me somehow to embark upon the six (or is it seven?) Certainly, as Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, “none ever wished it longer than it is.” Musil began working on The Man Without Qualities in 1924. The unfinished drafts and notes do add some depth to the relationship between Ulrich and Agathe, there are some gems there. (Like many of the important female characters, Agathe’s name is of some significance: it comes from the Greek word agathos, “the good,” i.e., that to which we all aspire.) by Vintage, Eine Art Einleitung / Seinesgleichen Geschieht. by Minerva. He took a diploma from the Technical University in Brno in 1901, and, after doing his military service, spent a year working in the engineering laboratories in Stuttgart. I know for ancient authors there can be such enormous differences in translations. Although the Man Without Qualities is an incomplete work, it remains as rich as any major novel of the 20th century; if only Musil had been able to endow it with the structural strength and form to bring it to a close as his primary literary rivals (Joyce, Proust) had done so brilliantly. Recommended for fans of. Both celebrations were scheduled to take place in 1918. In one pivotal chapter, Musil reflects on the “peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical, and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them.” This is the key passage: Scientific rationality in this sense is not merely disillusioning; it is radically dehumanizing. This is the case with The Man Without Qualities, a book I had attempted twice last year but found hard to really get into. It is only that if they penetrated the iridescent surface of their civilization in search of “reality” (they were contemporaries of Freud and, almost, of the Neo-Positivists), they did so with the period’s old vocabulary, and conditioned by its climate of moribund irony. Apparently with the acquiescence of her husband, Hermine maintained what amounted to a ménage à trois with one Heinrich Reiter, who met the family in 1881, shortly after Robert was born. Musil ridicules the Romanticism of characters like Diotima who condemn science for disenchanting the world with “facts.” And yet he seems to side with Ulrich when he explains that “knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion. Musil has great fun playing these characters off one another. Start by marking “The Man Without Qualities: Volume II” as Want to Read: Error rating book. Next is a comparison of Musil’s satire of the media which I mentioned in a previous post. Polyptoton was a term I didn’t know; looking it up took me to the related ‘antanaclasis’ – repetition of the same word in different senses. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. The real truth between two people cannot be put into words. Regardless of the presence, absence or definition of plot, this work–what I’ve thus far read of it, which is the first book of the original translation–is nearly universally quotable. It is also, in parts, an exceptionally funny book. Well, I could no more ever really "finish" reading the material in this volume than the benighted Musil could finish writing his novel. ).The main character, Ulrich, flounders with professional identity. This one started out like homework, but ended up as addicting as any great story. Also, once you slog through the sometimes interminable Ulrich-Agathe dialogues where they talk in circles and a. No question. II has 1200+ unpublished in his lifetime pages. Just another, merely, nothing but … How liberating, how dismissive are these instruments of dispensation—but how untrue, finally, to our experience. So interesting! As Musil himself acknowledged in a note, “Volume One closes approximately at the high point of an arch; on the other side it has no support.”, It has often been pointed out that, at bottom, Musil was a kind of moralist. She called this position ‘thinking.’”, And then there is Ulrich’s cousin Ermelinda Tuzzi, a prime mover of the Parallel Campaign.
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