Rating: 
Summary: Essential Reading
Review: Like Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", this immense book aims at giving an overview of the ideas of its time. Musil is a more precise thinker and stylist than Mann, and "The Man Without Qualities" has a lot more to offer than Mann's book. There are two opposing tendencies in the novel: On the one hand, Musil offers a highly entertaining satirical portrait of Austria-Hungary right before the First World War. His detached hero Ulrich meets all kinds of bizarre people, who happen to be members of the ruling class of the country. Like a vivisecteur, Ulrich analyzes the philosophies and ideologies of his time. On the other hand, he dreams of a kind of new mysticism, an emotional purity that is opposed to the dross surrounding him; together with his sister he embarks on quest for "the other state of being". Musil never finished the novel, he died before he could achieve a conclusion; which may have been impossible anyway. This gigantic torso of a novel is arguably the greatest novel of the century. I have not yet come across anything that could rival it. Musil's prose is so precise that after reading a few pages you feel that your mind has been refreshed and cleared. This is not a novel to be read in a few days, but even if you never manage to finish it, you will always come back to it.
Rating: 
Summary: 4 stars for structure
Review: Musil has been compared to the greats of 20th Cent fiction. His ideas are great but you have to possess the patience of a scholar or archivist to wade through these endless pages to find them. He did not have the gift of shaping a readable novel that Joyce or Proust had. If you found their novels difficult well just wait til you read this Austrian. Entertained you will be by his mind, impressed you won't be by his abaility to order and pare his thoughts down into a piece of highly crafted fiction. Theres just too much here to make sense of. The high points are high though. If you invest in this you will get your moneys worth but your readers good sense will tell you folly every step of the way. Passages not the entirety will impress.
Rating: 
Summary: Caveat.
Review: Musil's astringent style, here as elsewhere in his corpus, is undeniably bracing, thrillingly acerbic, almost chastening; thus, the very labor involved in the reading of his books and essays is a kind of ascesis, a rigorous exercise of spirituality. However, I urge the prospective reader of "The Man Without Qualities" to turn instead to Musil's earlier "Young Torless" and the short stories "Three Women"; all the virtues and benefits entailed in the reading of his magnum opus can be garnered in an incomparably more manageable digest of these earlier works. As an illuminator of human psyche, Musil is sorely inferior to the likes of Proust, with whom Musil is regularly -- and wrongfully -- compared. The psychological atmosphere in "The Man Without Qualities" is pinched, squint-eyed and scored with mysogyny; the protagonist, Ulrich, feels like a lofty embodiment of the sort of contemptuous survey of culture to which Musil himself seems to have aspired; this hero's failings, in stark contrast to those of most other characters in the book, are suspiciously immune to the indignity and mockery that falls upon everyone else. As a philosophically inclined thinker, Musil is largely an epigone of Schopenhauer, Freud and Nietzsche. He palpably resented this fact; it's evident from the snearing allusions to psychoanalysis that increasingly riddle his essays and fiction. However, as "The Man Without Qualities" gradually grew more unfocussed before disintegration, I found that my critical interest grew. Revealingly, with the loosening of his hold on the trajectory of his material, Musil, with venturesome uncertainty, adverts to the perilous enchantments of a mysticism which recalls the narcissistic rigors of Kierkegaard. Here Musil may indeed be of enormous clinical value as a seductive avatar of the sort of decadent spirituality which Nietzsche artfully (and, perhaps, definitively) diagnosed and anatomized in the third essay of his "Genealogy of Morality."
Rating:
Summary: LIterature at its finest
Review: Oft described as one of the three most seminal works of 20th century, Modernist literature (the others being Proust's Remembrance, etc. & Joyce's Ulysses), Die Man Ohne Eigenschaften is an amazing work of literature. At the risk of being redundant, as other reviews attest to its magnificience, I shall attempt to be pithy and somewhat original in terms of these reviews.
-This work shows the absurdity of the old aristocratic system of Austria at the turn of the century, and absurdity at large as well
-the way he depicts Prussia against Austria and yet with it will shed tremendous light on the extent to which America is Prussia II
-the work has some very stimulating approaches to the question of morality, even if you study philosophy
-his theistic/agnostic/atheistic ruminations are of central significance. Reading his ruminations on God as I rode a train through Austria and sipped Kirsch was one of the most splendid moments of my journey
-The British edition is condensed into one volume, for those who prefer something more singular, although it is lacking 80 or so pages of material from the American edition
-this work IS NOT slow, difficult reading. The prose is very well crafted. his wit moves things along fantastically
-this work is highly relevant to our own times like many of the greatest books, Musil's m. opus is often relegated to academe ... don't be part of that current. also rec: William Gaddis' THE RECOGNITIONS
Rating:
Summary: LIterature at its finest
Review: Oft described as one of the three most seminal works of 20th century, Modernist literature (the others being Proust's Remembrance, etc. & Joyce's Ulysses), Die Man Ohne Eigenschaften is an amazing work of literature. At the risk of being redundant, as other reviews attest to its magnificience, I shall attempt to be pithy and somewhat original in terms of these reviews.
-This work shows the absurdity of the old aristocratic system of Austria at the turn of the century, and absurdity at large as well
-the way he depicts Prussia against Austria and yet with it will shed tremendous light on the extent to which America is Prussia II
-the work has some very stimulating approaches to the question of morality, even if you study philosophy
-his theistic/agnostic/atheistic ruminations are of central significance. Reading his ruminations on God as I rode a train through Austria and sipped Kirsch was one of the most splendid moments of my journey
-The British edition is condensed into one volume, for those who prefer something more singular, although it is lacking 80 or so pages of material from the American edition
-this work IS NOT slow, difficult reading. The prose is very well crafted. his wit moves things along fantastically
-this work is highly relevant to our own times like many of the greatest books, Musil's m. opus is often relegated to academe ... don't be part of that current. also rec: William Gaddis' THE RECOGNITIONS
Rating:
Summary: THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES VOL.1 ~ROBERT MUSIL
Review: ROBERT MUSIL ,,DER MANN OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN.. TITLE IN GERMAN (I AM GERMAN) HAVE A GREAT INFLUENCE IN MY LIFE-EVEN I NEED 10 YEARS TO START WITH READING.I GET THE BOOK WHEN I WAS 15 YEARS OLD FROM THE WIFE OF A FRIEND AND ALL THE YEARS I WOULD START-TILL I BEGANN MY NEW LIFE IN SRI-LANKA,SINCE THEN I VALUE ROBERT MUSIL(AND ULLRICH)VERY MUCH,BECAUSE ...I AM A ROMANTIC EXISTENTIALIST AND READER OF BOOKS ...WULF TREU
Rating:
Summary: In Response to Linda's Review of this "Boring" Work
Review: Robert Musil may I remind you, was not a writer suited for the masses, he did not write to "entertain" people such as yourself who are bored by examination of a century, his century. His work is monumental in scope and it is truly extraordinary. Your review was taken from the back of a bookflap anyways because I don't see how you can so aptly describe it on one hand and then call it tedious.
Rating:
Summary: In Response to Linda's Review of this "Boring" Work
Review: Robert Musil may I remind you, was not a writer suited for the masses, he did not write to "entertain" people such as yourself who are bored by examination of a century, his century. His work is monumental in scope and it is truly extraordinary. Your review was taken from the back of a bookflap anyways because I don't see how you can so aptly describe it on one hand and then call it tedious.
Rating:
Summary: A Scathing Indictment of a Lost People
Review: The Man Without Qualities is about nothing. Nothing happens; there is nor growth in any of the characters, there are no decisions made, there are no actions taken. The main characters pontificate, discourse and expostulate endlessly. They think long and deep. Everyone seems steeped in metaphysics, philosophy, literature, dialectics, etc. But nobody does a damn thing. There are at least three relationships that are not consummated. Even when there is sex, it seems disconnected from the "pseudo reality" that is the milieu everyone moves in. Everyone is planning for a grand jubilee for the Emperor Franz Joseph, but after incessant meetings, no one can decide how to proceed.
The only character who seems to do anything is the sexual psychopath, Moosbrugger, who is a serial murderer of women. This is a very challenging book to read. You have to concentrate or you'll find that you've read several paragraphs or pages without knowing what you've just read. The Man Without Qualities is the ultimate "novel of ideas" but the irony is that it seems to be contemptuous of ideas if they do not bear fruit through the actions of decisive men and women of action. For a person or a culture without qualities, ideas are a paralyzing narcotic.
Rating:
Summary: A Brick for Your Shelf
Review: This is one of the novels that I have most looked foreward to reading. I was so happy to discover the greatest Austrian, if not European, novelist of the 20th century. I loved the title, and I usually love modernist literature and the difficulties it presents. With that said, reading this novel has been one of the most tedious and painful experiences I ever subjected myself to. I don't really care about any of the characters (how can you care for someone without qualities??), there is no plot, the characterization seems cliched, the ideas seem trite. This novel probably does give a good indiciation of how the Austro-Hungarian Empire must have felt in relationship to Europe right before World War I--someone just needed to shoot this cumbersome beast and put it out of its misery; the novel is the same way--compared to Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Svevo,even Faulkner, this novel doesn't hold much interest. I do feel that students of literature should at least read the first section, "A Sort of Introduction" to get a feel for what Musil is doing. But once one gets the point of the novel of ideas, one doesn't need to finish the rest of the novel, unless one is really into it (hey, enough readers seem to like it, maybe you will be one of them.) Finally, this is the type of book that looks good on a shelf, and the type of book that people read during graduate school and then never read again. It is a very important book, but knowing what Musil accomplished may be more of a prize than reading the entire novel. If anything you can wow your literary friends by mentioning a great Austrian writer with a name that sounds like cereal--don't worry most won't ask you anything more about the book.
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