The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil(1930)
NovelGerman
“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.”
The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil(1930)
A mathematician of considerable talent and no particular ambition drifts through Vienna in 1913, watching an empire prepare its own funeral with the meticulous enthusiasm of a committee. Robert Musil spent decades constructing this vast, unfinished novel, pouring into it everything he knew about precision and soul, the twin obsessions he believed the modern age had fatally separated. Ulrich, the man without qualities, is not empty but oversaturated, a mind so capable of seeing every possibility that he cannot commit to any single life. The novel's great subject is paralysis raised to philosophy, the terrifying freedom of a civilization that has mastered everything except the question of what any of it is for.
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