Description

A modernist masterpiece set in early 20th century Vienna, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is a sweeping satire of a society in decline.

It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist.

Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything so innate as a ‘character’, he is effectively a man ‘without qualities’, a brilliant, detached observer of the spinning, racing society around him. Part satire, part visionary epic, part intellectual tour de force, The Man Without Qualities is a work of immeasurable importance that captures the essence of a Europe on the brink of the First World War and the end of an era.

Publisher Review

There is scarcely a page that does not provoke new thoughts or offer new insights, not a chapter that, even read on its own, does not prove stimulating * Scotsman * At last, at last - the fully fleshed arrival in English of the third member of the trinity in twentieth-century fiction, complementing Ulysses and The Remembrance of Things Past . . . This last-waltz novel is amazingly contemporary * Wall Street Journal * Immensely rich and therapeutic, bristling with wit and a sly humour * Sunday Telegraph * I would recommend Sophie Wilkins' translation as a conscientious attempt to give to the English reader a novel which is compared to The Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses * The Times * The Man Without Qualities is one of the towering achievements of the European novel * Observer *