The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1:
A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails
Among the very best I've
read. No question. Up there shining a bright light in my own little personal
canonical firmament. The ideal book of ideas. Fans of towering literary
artistry will love this. Recommended for fans of Infinite Jest --
there's even a riff about what it means when a tennis player is called
a genius. Somewhere in Extinction, Bernhard notes that Musil is
the best prose writer ever in German. Fantastically drawn characters with
incomparable depth thanks to such clear, fluid, insightful exposition.
Things happen early on that are sustained and revisited throughout (ie,
there's a plot). Ulrich's beaten up, he hangs with his artistic piano-playing
friends, enjoys some intimacy with a married nympho, gets arrested, takes
a shine to a society-symbolizing lady killer, and becomes a member of the
Parallel Campaign! Otherwise, despite all this plot crap, every page packs
an epigrammical wallop. Unfakeable insight, wisdom, striking images. Exactly
the sort of thing I want and rail about when I don't get, especially in
books considered excellent. So many ideas, too many to even begin listing,
but never does it feel thematically scatterbrained or "encyclopedic" --
it's like a gracefully revolving squeezing out of nuanced colors from every
gradiation stop along the emotional, intellectual, psychological, artistic,
political, societal, and most importantly the spiritual spectrum (note:
"spiritual" doesn't mean "religious" as much as having to do with that
very Germanic concept of Geist, which I think is like the soul, the body,
the mind, the will, and all those old verities like courage and dignity
wrapped up in one -- the sort of thing ye olde uber-Modernist novels like
this are most concerned about). It's the sort of book that you want to
start summarizing and quoting until you've plagiarized all 725 pages. Did
things sometimes get a little slow? Not so often that I lost patience --
slower lulls came before the storms (albeit more of axiom than action).
Loved the Utopia of Essayism sections, sort of like prose-poem unpredictable
statement tilt-a-whirls re: Ulrich's way of life. Loved the two sections
about the Great Author (Arnheim) -- couldn't help thinking about how it
applied to JFranz these days (particularly the recent shitstorm about his
off-the-cuff anti-Twitter riffs). So often things seemed to directly address
today's Twittering soul (the action is set in 1913 Vienna; Musil wrote
it in the '20s/'30s) and, toward the end, the Occupy Movement. Not sure
how well this one would make out if run through the race, class, gender
thresher. Soliman, one of the most vivid and "poignant" characters in the
book, is like a horny Pip awash in a sea of upper-crust whitecaps. Diotima
and Bonedea I confused a little, despite warnings not to do just that,
thanks to their idealized names, but Rachel and particularly Clarisse,
if not Gerda, were more developed and felt real. There's still the second
volume and the notes of volume 2 to read but volume 1 feels absolutely
complete -- if Musil had said he was done at this point it would've been
considered a complete masterpiece instead of the first volume of an unfinished
mega-masterpiece. All the major character and thematic dealios seemed to
evolve and climax and close down at the end. Anyway, really glad I've read
this. Can't recommend it more highly to pretty much everyone -- for a book
of this size and sort, it seemed surprisingly accessible. Can't wait to
read some more Musil, some Mann, and other related Germanic stuff (Broch's
The
Sleepwalkers) this summer. Let's hope it's dark and dreary.
The Man Without Qualities Vol. 2:
Into the Millennium, from the Posthumous Papers
Putting it down for now at the end of the chapters published during
Musil's life -- that is, before the onslaught of 600+ pages of posthumous
papers. If Volume II maintained Volume I's towering literary artistry (TLA),
I'd read all the drafts and notes etc, but I need a break from so much
talk and talk and talk and talk about morality and willpower and the soul
and action and the science of thought and feelings and stuff. All these
ideas were animated and elevated and entangled in the first volume by consistently
robust/deepening characterization and a bit of plot tension and old-fashioned
love/power intrigue among the characters, but all that pretty much comes
to a halt in Volume II -- characterization ceases or at most functions
to remind you what's already been established, and there's really no tension
except whether or not Ulrich and his sister Agathe are gonna make out.
There's an affecting bit from the perspective of Agathe's husband, some
good bits from Clarise's progressively insane perspective, a vivid scene
in an insane asylum, high level stuff early on about Ulrich's father and
his funeral etc, and also insight into the historical/intellectual foundation
of what would become Nazism, but otherwise in Volume II the POV shifts
way more often (sometimes among a few people within a paragraph), the conversations
seem to go on too long and too often they cover similar ground, and the
newly introduced characters aren't particularly interesting, other than
Agathe, who's more or less Ulrich's twin in female form. The first volume
makes it worthwhile reading, like watching the deleted scenes on the DVD
of a movie you love, but I think Musil was writing a shorter novel than
he thought he was and so after a while what he was bringing up from the
well was dull and murky instead of refreshing and clear. Also seemed like
there was a different translator. Many more apostrophes and awkward phrases.
Oh well. I'm more likely to go back and read Volume I again than I am to
read the remaining 600+ posthumous papers and notes
The Confusions of Young Torless
Close third-person portrait of the artist as an adolescent exposed to
proto-Nazi homoerotic brutality at an all-boys boarding school. Opaque
philosophizing characteristic of a sensitive intelligent teen makes this
way
longer than 217 pages. Note that these are, per the title, '"Confusions,"
not "Confessions" (my copy was only called "Young Torless"). Observations
about artistic/intuitive emotional responses beyond rationality (ie, Kant,
mathematics) occasionally clearly rang inside this reader's head. Other
times Mr Musil had me way back on my heels. The S&M-addled intimacies
were surprising (and surprisingly well-rendered) for an autobiographical
first novel published in 1906. Loved a two-page section toward the end
relating Torless's adult perspective on his innocent early teen moral degradation
experience. |
