The Man Without Qualities- Robert Musil

[Amanda]

Since I don't think anyone else has started a thread for reviews of our current annual: I thought I would since I just finished it this week.

The Man Without Qualities is a "story of Ideas" that broadly follows the character of Ulrich (the titular man without qualities) as he wafts through life during the end of the Autor-Hungarian empire, pre-WWI. Written in several sections, the first major part deals with his involvement in a "parallel campaign" to celebrate emperor Franz Joseph's 70 year reign (largely a thinly veiled excuse to outdo German celebrations and flex a sense of Austrian superiority). The parallel campaign council also includes writers, industrialists, and a female Viennese philosopher they all call Diotima.

The next part then shifts to mostly focusing on Ulrich's weird way-too close relationship with his sister when they are reunited after their father's death. Finally, the books ends in found posthumous paper- different unfulfilled plans for the story, alternate scenes, broad ideas to incorporate, etc.

The story itself covers many themes such as the fall of the empire, existential philosophy, what the human experience means, desire and love, etc. Some of them I personally thought were more successful than others. I think how the parallel campaign is hijacked for different types of personal gain exemplifies how a fractured empire falls really well, but the attempts at the male author explaining how women feel about desire and love and how men treat them was less successful.

I also feel like including the posthumous papers as a large appendix as opposed to a major section of the "full book" to be read would have played out better as well. It is really disjointed to read, and I found myself speed reading through it and not really holding me like the other parts of the book.

Although I was a huge fan of the author's other list book (Confusions of Young Torless), I thought this one was more just fine in comparison and gave it 3 stars. It was good, but it didn't blow my mind, especially considering the length.

[[deleted user]]

Boy am I glad I made it to the end at some points it felt like that was never going to happen. I started out trying to read a chapter a day but found my motivation would wain and I would go days, weeks or months without picking this up. That is not to say the book is bad but in my honest opinion it is not suited to being read in this manner, when I picked it up and read big chunks at a time everything flowed and I found myself making progress and enjoying the ride.

Mostly…

This is not a bad book when I look back on it, there are loads of quotes I highlighted relating to art, politics, love, war, philosophy, sex and everything in between it just requires a lot of dedication from the reader for what can only be described as a rainy fireworks display.

3 Stars – Make time to read this without long pauses and enjoy all the interesting debates along the way as the ending won’t give you the payback you are seeking.

[Diane]

Rating: 4 stars


Wow. I finally finished this huge, and oddly unfinished, novel! It took me 11 months. If I had to do it all over again, I would have pushed through and finished it all at once instead of in installments. The monthly installments kept disengaging me from the story. I read the final 30-40% of the book "all at once" and found that to be the most enjoyable. I am not sure if that was due to reading it together or because that was the best part of the book. Perhaps a little of both. This is definitely a book that deserves your undivided attention.

The book takes place in Austria and focuses on the years prior to WWII. Ulrich, the protagonist is a 30-something mathematician with little direction in life, hence "the man without qualities". He is more of an observer than a doer. The book highlights certain philosophical concepts, including human nature.

[Kristel]

I finished 2021 annual read for Reading 1001. It took me 11 months though I did finish on December 1st. I found this book difficult to engage and I generally read it at the end of each month if I finished other books more to my liking. This is a lot of philosophy with a bit of a story to it. I would classify it maybe as satire of political systems. It is also unfinished which I really dislike reading unfinished novels, often finished by family members. Its also called a modernist novel. From wiki; the plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society, though the book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and so no one single theme dominates."
Here are my highlights;
1. We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream
2. mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.
3. he felt like some noxious little worm that was being attentively scrutinised by a large hen.
4. it could not ward off the realisation that in its main outlines life at such posts remains the life one has brought out from home with the rest of one’s luggage.
5. And as he advances through life, leaving behind him what he has lived through, a wall is formed by what is still to be lived and what has been lived, and in the end his path resembles that of a worm in the wood, which can twist any way it likes, even turning backwards, but always leaves an empty space behind it. And this dreadful feeling of a blind space, a space cut off behind all the fullness, this half that is always still lacking even although everything has become a whole, is what finally causes one to notice what one calls the soul.
6. In youth it is a distinct feeling of uncertainty, in everything one does, as to whether whatever it is is really the right thing. In old age it is amazement at how little one has done of all that one actually intended.
7. how science came to have its present-day aspect (which is in itself important, since after all it dominates us, not even an illiterate being safe from
8. primal Evil, as it might be called, is something they do not lose even in undergoing this trans formation. It is apparently indestructible and eternal, or at least as eternal as everything humanly sublime, since it consists in nothing less, nothing other, than the pleasure of tripping that sublimity up and watching it fall flat on its face.
9. awareness of the greater evil, a readiness to riot, a mistrust of everything one respects. There are people who complain about youth’s lack of ideals, but who, in the moment when they must act, automatically come to the same decision as anyone who, from a very healthy mistrust of ideas, reinforces their gentle power with a blackjack.

There you have it. Wiki sums it up well. This will never be a reread. Too much scrawl, failed to be succinct, failed to complete, some plot, some characters which both are a plus, poor kindle quality, Rating 2.6.

[H]

A book full of ideas and little action - Rating 3 stars - 1 for effort alone but only 2 for actual content.

All in all, I'm glad I read it, but it's not a standout novel in my mind and if Musil had lived to finish it, I have no doubt he would have dragged it out much further than I would have been willing to follow.

[Kristel]

Ginny wrote: "A book full of ideas and little action - Rating 3 stars - 1 for effort alone but only 2 for actual content.

All in all, I'm glad I read it, but it's not a standout novel in my mind and if Musil h..."
yes, I am afraid you're right, some don't know how to finish a novel

[Gail]

A rich dense book full of themes of such as the nature of love, the nature of mathematical thought, the nature of human interaction (there is a wonderful moment when two of the characters try very hard to "love their neighbor" even though their neighbor is a homeless man they have never met sitting on a bench). This reader could not do the book justice but I am glad I persevered and made it through. I also gave it 3 stars and felt guilty doing it as there seems to be many people that believe that it is one of the greatest books ever written.

[Pip]

I seem to be in the minority because I give this tome 5 stars. It did take me exactly a year to read, because for great stretches of time I did not read any of it. It is a book of ideas and satire and wit and complexity. I do not believe that I understood all of the arguments which the protagonist, Ulrich, developed with the other characters, but the political satire about the moribund Austro-Hungarian empire in its last years was deliciously obvious. Vienna in 1913 was concerned with designing a suitable pageant to celebrate Emperor Franz Joseph's 70 years on the throne (in comparison to Kaiser Wilhelm's 30 years in rival Germany). In the year in which the novel takes place no progress is made in this endeavour. The reader is aware that in 5 years, when the Jubilee was planned to take place the Empire would no longer exist.
The complexity comes about in the structure, which is a series of essays interspersed with some chapters which actually contain action, often the protagonist Ulrich's sexual activities. There are numerous themes. One is the tension between the logic of science and the emotion of morality. Another was the similarity between eroticism and mysticism. Ulrich proposes a General Secretariat for Precision and Soul, mirroring Musil's theme. Of course, this goes nowhere with the instigators of The Parallel Campaign. Because the novel was unfinished it is difficult to appraise it definitively, but it is one of the most impressive books I have read.