the man w/out qualities

[Reiner Haehnle]

: Can anyone dis' or recommend Musil's The Man Without Qualities as I am
: considering reading the beast, but Good Gravy, 1800 pages is quite a load
: for this eternal untermensching churl...

I first read MoE (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) thirteen years ago. It
is still one of my all-time favourite books. I continue to read a
chapter or two now and then.

Like GR, for me this is a book I can come back to time and again. Each
re-reading reveals new and surprising details.

BTW, at the end of the second volume of the German edition a bunch of
early stages of chapters, variants and incomplete chapters are
collected. It gives a fascinating view of Musil's workshop. Some
chapters he reworked dozens of times. I hope they bothered to include
some of this stuff in the American edition.

Perhaps I should also mention that Musil could not complete the
book. He died in the midst of working on it and an ending was not even
in sight...

I am not sure how well the extraordinary atmosphere created in the
book is preserved by the translation (I read it in German), but I
recall somebody mentioning that the translation is quite good.


	- Reiner

-- 
( Reiner H"ahnle                    Phone/Fax:   +49-721-608-4329 )
) Institute for Logic, Complexity      e-mail: haehnle at ira.uka.de (
( and Deduction Systems             `Nichts,                      )
) Department of Computer Science            Niemand,              (
( University of Karlsruhe                           Nirgends,     )
) 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany                                   Nie' (
( http://i12www.ira.uka.de/~reiner/               -- Arno Schmidt )


-- 
( Reiner H"ahnle                    Phone/Fax:   +49-721-608-4329 )
) Institute for Logic, Complexity      e-mail: haehnle at ira.uka.de (
( and Deduction Systems             `Nichts,                      )
) Department of Computer Science            Niemand,              (
( University of Karlsruhe                           Nirgends,     )
) 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany                                   Nie' (
( http://i12www.ira.uka.de/~reiner/               -- Arno Schmidt )