Reading the incomplete

[[deleted user]]

What is the feeling about reading The Man without Qualities. How do you read it. Vol 2, much larger than Vol 1, seems more fractured, at least once you get to the post humorous material. Do you read every page, filling in the gaps with your own sense of meaning, or do you read vol 2, not in continuation, but at a separate time. Does anyone have an idea.

Aaron

[Gene]

So then, the person who started this discussion thread isn't at Goodreads anymore? While the book, of course, still sits here? Yet another of the hundreds, nay, thousands of ironies connected with this massive work about a culture being overtaken by darkness, with fractured but glistening fragments, missing pieces of some gigantic puzzle, and once-grand qualities of a way of life that can neither be found nor lived anymore.

I have now been affected by this book for fifty years -- since 1962! I first came across an extensive reference to Musil's book in Wylie Sypher's Loss of The Self in Modern Literature and Art, and both books, as well as the central topic they treat, have remained there from that day on as something still alive and, fittingly, unfinished within me.

The first copy I bought of Musil's book was in English and consisted of 365 pages (making me wonder if that was deliberate!), and it only contained Volume I. Over the years, as my German, which wasn't begun until college, kept improving, I finally bought the complete three-volume work in German -- but it was often a heavy read and very tough going. Eventually, my German reached a point where I could read along with occasional ease across short spans of actual enjoyment. Thirty-three years later, when the whole work was finally and finely translated into English, I bought the mammoth book again as a reliable basis for comparison of the two versions.

Now, in the full light of day, the book looms before me like a sprawling, continental mountain range, showing itself for the undisputed classic it obviously is, and, doubtlessly, will ever remain. Musil's achievement and place in the history of world literature is assured. Its significance keeps on towering into the distance.

I'll go on to respond here to the questions of our missing instigator 'Aaron' left four years ago, in my own next posting -- which, like Mr. Musil's book, may go unnoticed by the millions of passers by who never come to know of its existence.



Gene

[Gene]

What is the feeling about reading The Man without Qualities. How do you read it. Vol 2, much larger than Vol 1, seems more fractured, at least once you get to the post humorous material. Do you read every page, filling in the gaps with your own sense of meaning, or do you read vol 2, not in continuation, but at a separate time. Does anyone have an idea.

My answer to Aaron's question is: Whichever of the two ways works for you is right! It may even be that one way works better for Part I, while the second works for Part II, and a mixture of both works best for Part III.

When I started Musil's book, it was largely framed in that context into which Sypher's article had placed it in for me: seeing it as a symbol of a formerly grand but now collapsing era of Western culture, some strands of which I had already come across and, indeed, in some cases even been educated in -- particularly in philosophy, language, theology, and "culture studies."

Then, as I persevered and my German improved, it became more like a never-ending novel with distinct characters I'd come to know as people undergoing events in light of their specific personal experiences. Instead of sweeping huge historical changes, it became very specific, local, and filled with humans interacting to the definite circumstances in which they found themselves -- and their actions having consequences that marked and shaped their lives . . . just as anybody's life is in any period. Just as Aaron's life, wherever he may have gotten to, undoubtedly is right now.

That first version I started with, remember, was only Part I.

[Jon]

I struggled through parts I&II without seeing the greatness of this book. I guess it gives a decent character description of some personalities in central Europe around 1920. Other than that I dont see much value in the book other than it being very famous. No great ideas applicable to our modern time as I had hoped for. I also see others could not stop laughing reading The Man Without Qualities. To me it was not funny at all.