9780679767879

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation--published in two elegant volumes--is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

"So here it is--at last, at last--the full-fleshed arrival, in English, of the third member of the trinity in 20th-century fiction, complementing 'Ulysses' and 'Remembrance of Things Past'. I am referring, of course, to the second coming of 'The Man Without Qualities'....With few exceptions [Sophie Wilkins, the translator] has devised a deft English equivalent for the ornateness that gives the story its rotogravure-era authenticity, as well as for those elements in Musil's own prose that makes us sit up in our own fin de siecle and say, 'Hey, that's right!'"

Frederic Morton, Wall Street Journal

"'The Man Without Qualities' reserves its most savage mockery for manifestations of pseudo-soul....But the ferocity of these attacks argues for the importance of what is being defended. The experience of soul is made central to Ulrich's intellectual perplexities; it is the fata morgana that leads him away from the world....The man without qualities laughs, but he is not happy. Consciousness torments him....It is the beauty of Musil's German, at once sensuous and intellectually intense, that gives weight to this novel about weightlessness. It's in the words, in the extraordinary metaphoric richness of the writing, that the substantial world finds its way into the book."

Thomas Mann

The Man Without Qualities: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudoreality Prevails: Search Results