Along the sun-spattered boulevards of Vienna in the year 1913, in its gayest cafés and greyest prisons, in its most brilliant salons and dingiest kitchens, the great Austrian writer, Robert Musil, brings the reader of The Man Without Qualities face to face with life itself. This magnificent novel justly has been compared with the best of modern masterpieces. One must turn to writers of the genius of Joyce and Proust, Stendhal and Dostoyevsky, to find a talent of equal brilliance.
This intriguing landmark of modernism from Austrian writer Robert Musil has been newly translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins and re-edited in a textual overhaul. This new edition includes portions of the author's original manuscripts that have never been published before. Though an imposing edifice of writing, devotees of literary modernism and anyone interested in the decline of the Austrian empire must read this sweeping, comic take on life in pre-Great War Vienna. The story of Ulrich, the man without qualities himself, is continued in a second volume, The Man Without Qualities: Into the Millenium, From the Posthumous Papers.
