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blueyorkie's review against another edition
3.0
This ending is from a Classic modernist novel: hallucinogenic, ironic, profound, frivolous, subtle, hidden.
jimmylorunning's review against another edition
5.0
"Musil, given his desperate personal situation and the Nazi takeover in Germany, compares his continued work on The Man without Qualities to “the diligence of a woodworm, boring through a picture frame in a house that is already ablaze”Close to the end of this unfinished tome, Ulrich muses about the condition of modern life wherein we are presented with so many raw facts and feelings that theories arising from them from every direction can appear equally valid, none having a monopoly on the truth:
Does man act only according to his emotional impulses, does he only do, feel, and indeed think, that to which he is impelled by unconscious streams of longing or the milder current of pleasure, as is nowadays widely assumed to be the case? Or does he perhaps, after all, act according to reason and will--as is also widely assumed today? Is he particularly at the mercy of certain impulses, such as the sexual, as is nowadays assumed? Or at the mercy not of sexual preconditions, but of the psychological effect of economic conditions, as is also assumed?He concludes in a typical non-conclusive way:
An organism as complex as man can be regarded from many sides, and one can choose one or the other axis in the theoretical picture: what one gets is partial truths, out of the interpenetration of which truth slowly rises higher. Or does it really rise higher? Every time a partial truth has been taken for the sole explanation of things, there has been a heavy price to pay. On the other hand, nobody would have arrived even at the partial truth if it had not been over-estimated. So the history of truth and the history of feeling are in many ways interlinked; but that of feeling remains obscure. Indeed to Ulrich’s way of thinking, it was not a history at all, but a wild tangle.Likewise, in a book this wide ranging and complex, I feel like you could come out of it with many different theories, each equally valid (and also equally invalid), since every theory misses the truth by its very simplification of the thing itself. Thus, I found it interesting upon finishing the book and reading Eithne Wilkins’s preface, that I never thought of Musil’s main themes the way she did (she says they are ‘love and belief’) but that reading her explanation of them, I could see a certain truth in them also.
All this to say that this work is truly hard to capture. And this being the third volume (about 700+ pages precede this), you would think that by now it would be on autopilot, but that is hardly the case. In fact, Wilkins says “The previous volumes are in fact a sort of prologue, and the story begins only now, at the point where Musil originally intended to begin it...It may be disconcerting to realise that now we shall need to re-read over a thousand pages of prologue to the story. But Musil is a disconcerting writer. And one of his characteristics is to reward every re-reading with a profusion of new insights.”
I can already see myself re-reading these books over and over again for the rest of my life, grasping a little more each time. But for the sake of this first time through, I wanted to jot down a few insufficient notes of things I noticed:
1.
Just when I thought the book couldn’t get any better, any more complex, any more interesting, Musil exceeds all my expectations. Book 3 begins with a new character, Ulrich’s sister Agathe. They spend a lot of time together in the country after his father dies, and this was a much needed break for me from the city characters (Bonadea, Walter, Clarisse, Stumm, etc). This part of the novel focuses on the thorny idea of morality. But less in a ideal sense, and more in a practical sense. Agathe is like the manifestation of Ulrich’s ideas, whereas Ulrich’s ideas are only approximations of extremes, Agathe doesn’t overthink them, she acts directly out of the same forces that makes Ulrich think, yet she doesn't often know why she is acting. This scares Ulrich, but also attracts him.
The part with Agathe in the first 100 pages or so was amazing, probably one of the best parts of the entire book, with great dialogue and thinking and dynamic between them, but when Ulrich goes back to the city, I was quite reluctant to follow him. I was tired of his talks with the city folks already, and wanted more of Agathe.
2.
The more I read this book the more I see the original review I wrote for Part 1 of this book as inadequate. The ideas I wrote about then seem so naive and simple now, yet I don’t think they were wrong... It’s just that, with Musil, every idea has 5, 10, 100 gradations, in more and more minute detail. This doesn’t sound fun to read, but it is! (surprisingly!) But I’m glad I wrote what I did in my review of part 1 because at this point the ideas are so complex and subtle (though similiar in nature and theme) I’m not sure I can even put them into words. Someone can spend their whole life studying this book.
3.
“Ahead of him he saw her figure under her dress like a big white fish quite close to the surface. He felt the masculine urge to harpoon that white fish and see it flap and struggle, and the urge was an equal blend of repugnance and desire.”Often called a book of ideas, this is more like a book of constantly-arriving-at-ideas. It never arrives, it is only interested in the process. Thus, the vehicle for the arriving-at, i.e. the writing, often contains gem after gem. This is not a crude container, as in some other idea-driven un-feeling novels like The Fountainhead. Each sentence, even in translation, is crystal clear, metaphors containing equal parts scientific precision and emotional weight, often so apt that it stuns me (or sometimes intentionally clunky/non-apt as to create a stunningly jarring effect).
“and through the darkness the aerial storm of love came raging like a gale. It was with a thud that it set the lovers back on firm ground again, when, vanishing through the walls, it let them go. And now the darkness lay between them like a lump of coal with which the sinners had blackened themselves.”Musil proves that the novel can be a perfect vehicle for philosophy, if written well enough, except what he’s written isn’t philosophy at all. Instead, he attempts to put science, philosophy, and art/humanities on an equal playing field as the three legs of a stool for thinking/feeling about the modern world. These competing extremes do not have to be extremes in Musil’s world, but instead complement each other, teasing out each other’s blind spots and tugging at each other’s hems and haws for a semi-truth of fluctuating averages. Though he philosophizes, and though he writes with scientific precision, he does not sacrifice any of the wordplay, wit, or feeling in the prose.
4.
I don’t know why I never noticed this until around the middle of this volume, but almost every time a conversation about something starts taking shape, it gets interrupted. Usually it’s right when it gets close to the conclusion of a certain theory Ulrich is arriving at... something inevitably comes up, a phone call or General Stumm von Bordwehr comes barging in or something, but the point is the novel is filled with these false-starts, where no conclusion is ever made. Aptly, the novel is about a patriotic celebration of a ‘great idea’ that would inevitably be interrupted by war (as is foreshadowed by the setting). Also apt is the fact that the novel itself is never finished, Musil himself being interrupted by war and death.
"The story of this novel amounts to this, that the story that ought to be told in it is not told." - Musil5.
In the same way that he was interested in extreme ideas/ideals in earlier parts of the book and how they operate in society, here the ideas get more personal and universal at the same time. He takes on the extreme opposites of male/female, of brother/sister, of moral-right/wrong, of self/other, especially in Ulrich and Agathe’s relationship. He takes apart these extremes by burying them in particulars, so that they become a million tiny moments, and at any particular moment Ulrich and Agathe are merely more brother and sister or more lovers or more siamese twins, etc. but never wholly one thing or the other. This indefinable relationship exists on a continuum, as does the morality of their actions within it.
6.
Even in the last 50 pages, new characters were being introduced. If Musil had finished this novel, it probably would’ve been 3000+ pages. What’s surprising is that it continually renews itself despite the lack of any kind of traditional plot. Some chapters hold up better than others, but I rarely felt like he was not moving along at a certain pace of thought, where ideas are continually rising to the surface to form new concoctions. This is truly one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Further Reading: my review of The Man Without Qualities, Volume 1
magicandmystery's review
4.0
I finally finished book 27- The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. As I set out to write this I have no idea how I am going to summarize a three volume mega novel with a philsophical bent. The first two volumes I didn't like very much, but the third volume I adored. I am not sure what that makes the average for the entire novel in terms of rating, but I guess over all it falls somewhere around a 3 star novel.
The novel, featuring a man named Ulrich who opts out of life by taking a year holiday and doing nothing but thinking through life, has very little action in it. The essential plot follows a cast of characters who have banded together for the collatoral campaign, a project that is trying to come up with one idea to symbolize the monarch's jubilee. Most of the novel consists of Ulrich playing the devil's advocate through a whole host of conversations with various people. He argues a great deal of the time from both sides of every argument which a lot of the time is highly irritating. The last novel takes place after his fathers death when he reunites with a sister he hasn't seen in years. They have an almost incestuous relationship as they both see each other as two halves of a whole. Ulrich's philosophy is finally solidified at this point in the novel.
One of my favorite tangents in the novel was Ulrich playing with the idea of soul. I actually really like the idea he has which is essentially that the soul is all the empty places inside of us not filled up by personality, societal views or personal feelings. Here are some quotes:
"Every dweller on earth has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled"
" some people even think away out and beyond everything, of a God who has the missing piece of themselves in His pocket"
"all roads to the mind start from the soul, but none leads back again"
"the loved person seems to stand where otherwise there is always something missing"
"I called it the acoustics of the void"
The book also had a great deal to stay about the idea of "mystic rapture". I was ecstatic to feel what I have felt many a time (and often describe as "so excited I could scream" ) laid out in such fantastic words. It made my heart burn with the excitement the book was describing. It is for this reason, that I can't say I hate this book. It is also this idea of connectedness with the larger world beyond that makes me love literature. When you see something of yourself, outside of yourself it is very heart warming and leaves you with a feeling that all is not lost in the world.
"all moments that had meant something decisive in his life ahd left him with the same feeling"
"all decisive moments of his life had been associated with such a sensation of amazement and lonliness"
"every sort of excitement that exceeds the normal very soon mists over with a patina of melancholy, absurdity and satiation."
"They call it an undoing of self, and at the same time declare they live more fully than ever"
"The heart 'ravenous and satiated' , as they say- suddenly finds itslef in those utopian regions that lie somewhere and nowhere between an infinite tenderness and an infinited loneliness"
The book also has a lot to say about love and what it means between a man and women, but also the love of ideas. Most of the characters are in love with someone, or over the course of the novel several someones. Diotima, Ulrich's cousin is intellectually in love with a member of the collatoral campaign and debates the entire novel whether to take this into the physical realm.
The most fantastic quote that Ulrich aid to Diotima was this:
"to strip to the skin, put arms round each other's shoulders and instead of talking, burst out singing"
and also encouraged her to 'so to speak touching him under his pscyhological loin cloth without shuddering"
There were a lot more that were interesting including these;
"...had entered the territory of intimacy where one reveals oneself to the other person in all one's emotional disorder"
"When do you understand another human being? You have to play along with him"
"It goes back a very long way, this desire for a doppelganger of the opposite sex, this craving for the love of a being that will be entirely the same as oneself and yet another"
"true love-sickness is not desire for possession, but only a gentle unveiling of the wordl itself"
Finally there is a lot that talks about morality. Ulrich never really officially pins down his philsophy of life, but essentially you are never left feeling that the world doesn't have meaning or that there isn't a God. Despite several arguements about good and evil and deconstructing them Ulrich still believes that they exist. This book talks a lot about how morality should be fun and that living a life consistent with your own philosophy of life should not be boring. It left me excited about life and with a feeling that one can have a personal view of the world, still believe in some form of universal truth, but yet also be open to the differences amongst people. By playing both sides of each arguement I really feel like Ulrich comes closer to the truth about life than a lot of other people. He plays with the idea of a both/and philsophy and also that the truth lifes somehwere in between polar sides of an argument.
"We ourselves must work out the sum he sets us"
"he regarded the problem set by every human life as one of these" (a math problem with a specific answer but no general one)
"nowadays every truth comes into the world split into two mutually antagonistic falsehoods"
"perhaps they're potentially good human beings. They don't lose that even as criminals"
"Why should moral people be so dreary...when their intentions are good ought to be the most delicious, the most difficult, the most enjoyable thing anyone can possibly imagine"
"All moral propostions, "Ulrich confirmed, ' refer to a sort of dream condition that's long ago taken wing and flown away ot of the cage of rules in which we try to hold it fast"
"For him morality was neither conformism nor the sum of acquired knowledge: it was the infinite fullness of lifes potentialities"
"morality is imagination'
This book was fun, Ulrich never takes himself seriously and you feel light hearted and silly about everything the whole time. It is long, though, and daunting. Large chunks of the book at times seem unnecessary and the action is slow moving. The book also doesn't come to a conclusion either because the author never finished the novel or he purposely leaves it vague. Either way, this book is likely not for everyone. I love philosophy and playing around with ideas in my head so for that I mostly enjoyed the book.
The novel, featuring a man named Ulrich who opts out of life by taking a year holiday and doing nothing but thinking through life, has very little action in it. The essential plot follows a cast of characters who have banded together for the collatoral campaign, a project that is trying to come up with one idea to symbolize the monarch's jubilee. Most of the novel consists of Ulrich playing the devil's advocate through a whole host of conversations with various people. He argues a great deal of the time from both sides of every argument which a lot of the time is highly irritating. The last novel takes place after his fathers death when he reunites with a sister he hasn't seen in years. They have an almost incestuous relationship as they both see each other as two halves of a whole. Ulrich's philosophy is finally solidified at this point in the novel.
One of my favorite tangents in the novel was Ulrich playing with the idea of soul. I actually really like the idea he has which is essentially that the soul is all the empty places inside of us not filled up by personality, societal views or personal feelings. Here are some quotes:
"Every dweller on earth has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled"
" some people even think away out and beyond everything, of a God who has the missing piece of themselves in His pocket"
"all roads to the mind start from the soul, but none leads back again"
"the loved person seems to stand where otherwise there is always something missing"
"I called it the acoustics of the void"
The book also had a great deal to stay about the idea of "mystic rapture". I was ecstatic to feel what I have felt many a time (and often describe as "so excited I could scream" ) laid out in such fantastic words. It made my heart burn with the excitement the book was describing. It is for this reason, that I can't say I hate this book. It is also this idea of connectedness with the larger world beyond that makes me love literature. When you see something of yourself, outside of yourself it is very heart warming and leaves you with a feeling that all is not lost in the world.
"all moments that had meant something decisive in his life ahd left him with the same feeling"
"all decisive moments of his life had been associated with such a sensation of amazement and lonliness"
"every sort of excitement that exceeds the normal very soon mists over with a patina of melancholy, absurdity and satiation."
"They call it an undoing of self, and at the same time declare they live more fully than ever"
"The heart 'ravenous and satiated' , as they say- suddenly finds itslef in those utopian regions that lie somewhere and nowhere between an infinite tenderness and an infinited loneliness"
The book also has a lot to say about love and what it means between a man and women, but also the love of ideas. Most of the characters are in love with someone, or over the course of the novel several someones. Diotima, Ulrich's cousin is intellectually in love with a member of the collatoral campaign and debates the entire novel whether to take this into the physical realm.
The most fantastic quote that Ulrich aid to Diotima was this:
"to strip to the skin, put arms round each other's shoulders and instead of talking, burst out singing"
and also encouraged her to 'so to speak touching him under his pscyhological loin cloth without shuddering"
There were a lot more that were interesting including these;
"...had entered the territory of intimacy where one reveals oneself to the other person in all one's emotional disorder"
"When do you understand another human being? You have to play along with him"
"It goes back a very long way, this desire for a doppelganger of the opposite sex, this craving for the love of a being that will be entirely the same as oneself and yet another"
"true love-sickness is not desire for possession, but only a gentle unveiling of the wordl itself"
Finally there is a lot that talks about morality. Ulrich never really officially pins down his philsophy of life, but essentially you are never left feeling that the world doesn't have meaning or that there isn't a God. Despite several arguements about good and evil and deconstructing them Ulrich still believes that they exist. This book talks a lot about how morality should be fun and that living a life consistent with your own philosophy of life should not be boring. It left me excited about life and with a feeling that one can have a personal view of the world, still believe in some form of universal truth, but yet also be open to the differences amongst people. By playing both sides of each arguement I really feel like Ulrich comes closer to the truth about life than a lot of other people. He plays with the idea of a both/and philsophy and also that the truth lifes somehwere in between polar sides of an argument.
"We ourselves must work out the sum he sets us"
"he regarded the problem set by every human life as one of these" (a math problem with a specific answer but no general one)
"nowadays every truth comes into the world split into two mutually antagonistic falsehoods"
"perhaps they're potentially good human beings. They don't lose that even as criminals"
"Why should moral people be so dreary...when their intentions are good ought to be the most delicious, the most difficult, the most enjoyable thing anyone can possibly imagine"
"All moral propostions, "Ulrich confirmed, ' refer to a sort of dream condition that's long ago taken wing and flown away ot of the cage of rules in which we try to hold it fast"
"For him morality was neither conformism nor the sum of acquired knowledge: it was the infinite fullness of lifes potentialities"
"morality is imagination'
This book was fun, Ulrich never takes himself seriously and you feel light hearted and silly about everything the whole time. It is long, though, and daunting. Large chunks of the book at times seem unnecessary and the action is slow moving. The book also doesn't come to a conclusion either because the author never finished the novel or he purposely leaves it vague. Either way, this book is likely not for everyone. I love philosophy and playing around with ideas in my head so for that I mostly enjoyed the book.
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