Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - Softcover

Musil, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0941419010 ISBN 13: 9780941419017

Publisher: Marsilio Pub, 1987

Synopsis

This is Robert Musil's last book, a collection of satirical pieces, short stories and prose reflections published in 1936. It is divided into sections with titles like "Pictures", "Ill-tempered observations" and "Unstorylike stories".

About this title

About the Author

Robert Musil (1880–1942), born in Vienna, was trained as a mathematician, behavioral psychologist, engineer, and philosopher. During WWI, he served as an officer in the Austrian Army on the Italian front. He died exiled and impoverished in Switzerland in 1942. Author of The Man Without Qualities, Young Törless, and Five Women, Musil is one of the towering pillars of twentieth-century modernism.

Recipient of the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, the recent memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, and the forthcoming novel Cold Earth Wanderers. His translations from the German include Heinrich Heine’s Travel Pictures, Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Peter Altenberg’s Telegrams of the Soul, and Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, published by Penguin Classics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Flypaper

Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it – not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there – it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm, unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognized as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers, holds us tight. Here they stand all stiffly erect, like cripples pretending to be nor- mal, or like decrepit old soldiers (and a little bowlegged, the way you stand on a sharp edge). They hold themselves upright, gathering strength and pondering their position.

About this edition

• Publisher: Marsilio Pub
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0941419010
• ISBN 13: 9780941419017
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 145