The first English translation of selected entries from the
introspective notebooks of Musil, one of Austria's greatest writers
of modernist fiction. Musil was one of the more important
German-language modernists to emerge from the Viennese cauldron of
intellectual ferment between 1900 and 1945. He remains best known
for two novels: The Confusions of Young Toerless (1902) and The Man
Without Qualities (1933 and 1943). This latter effort is an
enormous canvas in which Musil attempted to portray the totality of
Austrian social, intellectual, and spiritual confusion that led up
to the First World War and - ultimately - contributed much to the
Nazi era. Musil, a compulsive perfectionist, never finished the
book. The Nazis drove him into exile. He died in 1942, leaving
behind massive amounts of notes, sketches, plans, and diaries. Four
years ago a new, expanded translation of The Man Without Qualities
appeared in the US, and interest in Musil seems to be growing. The
present selection of entries (about two-fifths of the German
edition) offers a glimpse into the novelist's personal life and
into his workshop. What the diaries do not offer is a lively,
gossipy portrait of his eventful times and its personalities. Musil
was a difficult, somewhat withdrawn intellectual. His diaries
reveal an immensely intense, sovereign, and introspective mind,
immersed in the intellectual topics of the day. Consequently, these
diaries are demanding to read and will be of interest mainly to
those already conversant with his fiction. Musil enthusiasts will
find the diaries a valuable resource; the unindoctrinated will
likely be disoriented. The translator, a British professor of
German literature, has done a respectable job of selecting passages
from the excellent German edition and rendering them into English,
but his explanatory notes, while often helpful, are a bit on the
skimpy side. American novelist Mark Mirsky (English and Jewish
Studies/City College of New York) contributes an infectiously
enthusiastic introduction and is billed as the volume's editor, but
it is not clear in what sense he has edited the diaries. A welcome
companion to Musil's translated oeuvre, but not a stand-alone read.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and James Joyce for
his monumental, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. His
Diaries, a distillation of forty-three years of material, are
valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document
of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting
autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that
details the moods of artistic adventure.
Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from
scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal
the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and
transcendence.
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