Trained in science and philosophy, he left a career in the military to turn to writing. This last-waltz novel is amazingly contemporary." -Wall Street Journal ’One of the towering achievements of the European novel’ -Observer ’Immensely rich and therapeutic, bristling with wit and a sly humour’ -Sunday Telegraph Robert Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1880.
"There is scarcely a page that does not provoke new thoughts or offer new insights, not a chapter that, even read on its own, does not prove stimulating." -Scotsman "At last, at last - the fully-fleshed arrival in English of the third member of the trinity in twentieth-century fiction, complementing Ulysses and The Remembrance of Things Past. Part satire, part visionary epic, part intellectual tour de force, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil is a work of immeasurable importance. Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything so innate as a ’character’, he is effectively a man ’without qualities’, a brilliant, detached observer of the spinning, racing society around him. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. “With an introduction by Jonathan Lethem It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef.
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