Musil Diaries

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 His Diaries, a distillation of forty-three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that details the moods of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.

Robert Musil (1880-1942) spent much of his life writing The Man Without Qualities, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. Mark Mirsky is the editor of Fiction magazine, and runs the creative writing program at the City University of New York. Philip Payne is Professor of German Studies at Lancaster University and Head of its Department of European Languages and Cultures.