![]() ![]() In the early 1920s, he was well along with The Twin Sister, a novel that introduced many of the themes and characters of The Man Without Qualities in miniature. Although he published relatively few works in his lifetime, he left behind thousands of pages of diaries, drafts, unfinished chapters, and alternative versions. ![]() Musil’s career is an admonition about the dangers of perfectionism. Though his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, is now more than 70 years old, its parables of blinkered utopianism, all-consuming doubt, and intellectualized violence all feel fresher and more timely than Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte or Dave Eggers’s ham-handed Trump satire The Captain and the Glory. This is a shame, because Musil anticipated our uniquely outlandish present, which even contemporary novelists have struggled and largely failed to portray. He is, along with Eugene Ionesco and perhaps Curzio Malaparte, one of that strange class of authors it sounds sophisticated to confess one hasn’t read. ![]() ![]() Robert Musil is the great also-ran, the Pete Best of modernism, forever overshadowed by his contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce. ![]()
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