Hermann Broch began writing this book under extraordinary circumstances as a prisoner in a German concentration camp in World War II. What emerged from that horrifying experience is one of the preeminent literary works of the 20th century.

The book is about Virgil's infamous deathbed request that his magnum opus, The "Aeneid," be burned because it was imperfect. Most of the book is told in a dazzling but recondite stream-of-consciousness mode, but the best section is Virgil's deathbed discussion with Caesar Augustus.

Broch invokes 20th century ideals such as the "authenticity" of art as a mirror to the natural world. We also encounter the dilemma of works of art that are incomplete & not polished completely. Aristotle said that in a perfect art work, every word contributes to the organic whole. Arbitrarily remove or add one word, says Aristotle, and the whole work comes crumbling down. Virgil uses this motif as his justification for wishing his beloved poem burned. Juxtaposed with this paradigm are the pleadings of Augustus that it is Virgil's duty as a Roman citizen to let his poem be read by all the world. After all, the literary excursion was to be Rome's national epic. The scene is, unmistakably, magnificent.

A considerable amount of background reading is required before attempting to take on this work. At a bare minimum, read the entire canon of Virgil, especially the "Aeneid." A workable familiarity of Roman history up until and including Augustus is necessary and a biography of Virgil (I would recommend Peter Levi's) would also be helpful. I am a fairly well-read guy, but some of the allusions went over my head.

The stream-of-consciousness style is interesting, but can make the book rather dense. Many of the sentences go on for pages and pages. The book attempts to capture the free-thought attributes of the machinery of Virgil's mind. An engrossing work of prose.

"Burn the Aeneid" Virgil instructs his friends from his deathbed. Broch, as Dante did before him, uses Virgil as a spiritual guide in this exploration of the metaphysical and moral imagination. Here, the dying poet, reflects feverishly, consciously transcending his decaying form into the infinite universe-- and despairs of hope, as his sheltering idealism is confronted with the reality of human existence, the limits and futility of his understanding. Virgil's trust in a civilized humane society, one that, at its source, springs from the individual's seeking of beauty, freedom and wisdom, disintegrates, into one represented by the predations of the mob of the streets of Rome, as does his confidence in the Aeneid, his opus. A dialogue on the fate of the Aeneid ensues between Virgil and Augustus, forming a complex debate on art and government. Virgil defends the purity of the perceived world as metaphor, free of the allusions of art; Augustus proposes the nobility of art as symbol for government. A delicate lattice of oppositions and constructive contradictions braces the book. This is, though, ultimately, a story of the human journey, a struggle with darkness and doubt, reconciliation, and a rise to salvation. The remarkable final section has the celestial translucence of 'Paradiso'. The Death of Virgil is among a handful of true literary masterpieces this century whose reach, that of the entire compass of human impulse, consciousness and conscience, has equalled its grasp. It is a work of intellectual and spiritual adventure. Broch orchestrates an inquiry and fugue, sombre and passionate, into life, encompassed in a sensuous poetic oration-- and Virgil continues to cast his spell on the divine and the aesthetic order, employed by masters to illuminate our deepest perplexities and aspirations.

A magnificent book by a true master. A journey into human soul, combining the novel with the symphony (note the parts of the book and the difference in the sentences for start). Do not miss it.

I first came to Broch via his renowned trilogy, Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers), and hesitated to read anything else by him because of a foolish fear that it would pale by comparison to the trilogy. I finally read Die Verzauberung and wasn't disappointed-- this allegorical story of the psychology of totalitarianism is Broch at the top of his powers. What did disappoint me, however, was the criticism: nothing addressed what to me were the obvious religious underpinnings of the book-- until The Genealogy of the Massenfuehrer, by Glenn Sandberg.

Sandberg's study is remarkable. It does a meticulous analysis of the text, proving without question that the religious images and themes are not random or half-baked, but rather well-laid and systematic scheme on Broch's part (the book is worth reading alone for his scrutiny of Broch's own reading). It goes beyond this, however, to a broad and deep review of the secondary literature, most of which he (rightly) finds wanting in its understanding of this crucial element of the book.

If you read one Broch novel besides The Sleepwalkers, it should be Die Verzauberung; if you read one book about Die Verzauberung, it should be Glenn Sandberg's The Genealogy of the Massenfuehrer.

Music In The Works Of Broch, Mann, And Kafka by John A. Hargraves is a serious, exhaustively researched studies of great literary works such as "The Death of Virgil," "The Sleepwalkers," and "Doctor Faustus" and the role music plays within the depths of the written words. Erudite, persuasively written and adhering to the rigorous demands of scholarship, Music In The Works Of Broch, Mann, And Kafka is a college-level and highly recommended literary study that lends a deepening appreciation to the subtle nuances of three great writers in German literature, music, linguistics, and culture.

The Spell is a triple themed suspense story: the themes are portraits of individuals bound and sustained by the land and by its customs, the concretization of visionary reality, and the assimilation of individualized evil into society. Very finely written, mytho-poetic narrative.

In his protagonist, Richard Hieck, Broch has presented us with a companion to Robert Musil's Ulrich: both are men influenced by the unsettling theories of their time and both search for meaning within the maddening cacaphony of ideas, but where Ulrich is swallowed by the din Broch presents us with an intriguing resolution to the problems of disorder. Hieck is a mathematician, an astronomer, a scientist - he is a lonely man who pursues knowledge down all of its blind alleys and dead ends purely for the sake of the pursuit, certain that there is no end, no ultimate goal. All of his relationships with the world are kept at an uneasy distance; from his half-demented mentor Doctor Weitprecht, his saintly younger sister Susanne (whose own response to the chaos of her times is to become a true "Bride of Christ"), his bohemian artist brother Otto - all are as equally inscrutable to Richard as are the millions of stars which pattern the night sky. And throughout his quest he remains haunted by the memory of his father, himself a scientist who succombed to the madness of the universe; it would seem that Richard is doomed to an obscure life and unrepented death. Can he be saved?
I mention the comparison to Robert Musil's masterpiece, "The Man Without Qualities" not only because it bears a relation to Broch's work but also because the respective authors seemed to have know of their connection. No less an authority that Elias Canetti - who knew both men - explains the animosity between the two thusly: Musil believed Broch to be an amateurish writer and was suspicious that Broch could claim to have "solved" the ideas presented in his works so quickly ("The Unknown Quantity" was written in six months while Musil's own opus went unfinished after a lifetime of work). Broch believed Musil a "king of a paper empire" whose life's work mirrored the chaotic unfathomability of the time. This writer's spat aside, I think that it illustrates Broch's conclusion, perhaps his "solution" to the Unknown Quantity.
Broch suggests that the missing element in the equation of Richard Hieck's life is simply love: "an awkward kiss released from all willing, released from Being, upborne by a wave of darkness." p.132 When Hieck accepts that there are no answers to be discerned from the infinity of stars above, when he allows himself to recognize the beauty that is next to him in the person of the devoted Ilse Nydhalm, when he understands that he cannot make himself desireless - only then is Richard Hieck saved from the world of pure knowledge. "[I]n the lonliness of the heart everything is absolute, in the heart there are no statistically approximate values, there the law is valid, and that is all that there is to say." p.176 The Unknown Quantity is elusive for Richard, but it is also his salvation.
I recommend this novel as a fine introduction to Hermann Broch, who is at his most accesible in this, his fourth work (published in 1933). It presents many of the same themes which dominate Broch's works, from his "Sleepwalkers" trilogy down to "The Guiltless." A challenging writer and a satisfying read.

This novel was born out of several previous short novellas, which Broch weaved together, adding new chapters and orderered to tell one multilayered story, a rich, complex and deep one. It is the story of A., a Dutch financier who lives in Germany. The three parts of the book correspond to the years 1913, 1923 and 1933. Besides portraying the pre-Hitlerian Germany, it is a metaphysical novel, in the strictest sense of the concept. The fundamental subject is indifference as an attitude towards life. "A" is indifferent to practically everything, including the suffering of his lover and, of course, political and social problems. The book is called "The guiltless" because no one assumes themselves as responsible for the dangerous path Germany was following in those years. However, "A" will pay a price for his indifference.

This novel is, then, a reflection on the social environment that led to Nazism. Broch is a dense but good writer, and I think this novel is recommended to any serious lovers of literature, but also for those interested in observing a recreation and a meditation on Germany in those three crucial decades for the world.

Arguably Broch's best novel. Not as overwrought as 'Death of Virgil', nor as tangential as 'The Sleepwalkers'. Here he finally cuts deep into the German mind tha lead to the horrors of WWII with lessons for all mankind. Brilliant.

I wrote the first review here of _The Sleepwalkers_.

Since a subsequent reviewer has mentioned Broch's "political activities", perhaps it is relevant here to quote something his son (H.F. Broch de Rothermann) told me: "There are many persons who could have done for the United Nations what my father did, but there is no one who can write the novels which for that reason [i.e., because Broch spent his time and energy on the UN instead of writing...] went unwritten."

It is a paradox that two of the most boldly innovative novels of the 20th century were written by a man who regarded literature as a poor substitute for philosophy. Hermann Broch undertook ''The Death of Virgil'', a fictional vision rivaled only by ''Finnegans Wake,'' because the radio station that commissioned him in the mid-30's to address the problem of literature at the end of a cultureal epoch insisted on a story rather than a lecture. When his narrative led him, like his hero Virgil, to the conclusion that poetry is immoral in an age of decline, Broch rejected literature and devoted himself until his death in 1951 to the study of mass psychology and politics.

''The Sleepwalkers'' is a thesis novel with a vengeance. According to Broch, sleepwalkers are people living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems, just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and walking. The trilogy portrays three representative cases of ''loneliness of the I'' stemming from the collapse of any sustaining system of values. ''The Romantic,'' a subtle parody of 19th-century realism, takes place in Berlin in 1888 and focuses on the Purssian landed gentry. Joachim von Pasenow is a romantic because he clings desperately to values that others regard as outmoded, and this ''emotional lethargy'' lends his personality a certain quaint courtliness but renders him unfit to deal with situations that do not fit into his narrow Junker code, such as his love affiar with a passionate lower-class young woman. ''The Anarchist'' moves west to Cologne and Mannheim in 1903 and shifts to the urban working class. The accountant August Esch, who lives by the motto ''business is business,'' seeks an escape into eroticism when he realizes that double-entry bookkeeping cannot balance the ethical debits and credits in the turbulent society of prewar Germany.

A plot summary does justice neither to the narrative power of ''The Sleepwalkers'' nor to its experimental origniality. Hoping to achieve what he called ''polyhistorical totality,'' Broch included, after the manner of Dos Passos, a number of parallel plots involving characters who exemplify the theme of existential loneliness - the esthete Eduard von Bertrand, a shadowy figure on whom the others project their hopes and fears; the shellshocked sholdier Godicke, who must reassemble his personality in The veterans' hosptial; the architect Jaretzki, who loses an arm in the war and with it, symbolically, his sense of proporation; the alienated young wife Hannah Wendling; the orphan Marguerite; and others. And the three parts are unified through a complex set of images involving uniforms (security) and the Statue of Liberty (freedom), a small reproduction of which Esch dreams over.

BUT multiplicity of narratives was not enough for Broch. He wanted to demonstrate that rationalism and irrationalism are also among the fragments that litter the psychic landscape when ethical unity falls apart. To represent these poles, he incorporated into the lengthy third part 16 chapters that sometimes rise to pure lyric poetry and 10 chapters of an essay titled ''Disintegration of Values.'' While the essay expounds the philosophical theory underlying the novel, the ''ballad'' tells a story seemingly unrelated to them main narrative - the love of a Salvation Army girl in Berlin and the Jew Nuchem is doomed by irreconcilable differences in religion. We come to realize that the narrator of the ballad, Dr. Bertrand Muller, is also the author of ''Disintegration of Values.'' Since the essay embraces the various plots, he is by extension the author of the entire novel. Through this series of encapsulations, Broch sought to create an ''absolute'' novel that, as in Einstein's theory of relativity, contained its own observer within the filed of observation.

This is a classic that enlarged the scope of 20th-century fiction by focusing with unparalleled precision on the profound transformation of values that produced the modern consciousness...

Broch's Trilogy is the chronicle of the evolution of Germany in particular and the whole Europe in general between the years 1888 and 1918. The philosophical focus of the trilogy should be searched for in the third novel, Huguenau or the Realist and within that in the essay 'Disintegration of Values", which is allegedly written by a Bertrand Mueller, who according to Broch himself is the same Bertrand who appears in the first two novels of the trilogy. The essay on disintegration of values closely follows Max Weber's Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. In fact not before we understand Weber's theory of modernity and the role of the protestant reformation in the rise of modern Capitalism can we appreciate the full vigor of Broch's narrative. In ten separate parts, Broch explains masterfully the notion of style of an age, the relation of plastic arts with the the style, the concept of inner logic within each indididual value-system and the effect of it on the life of the individual. The third part of the novel, the realist, is the culmination of the trilogy as such. It is where all the characters meet and it is there that Broch uses all different narrative modes. A certain air of inevitablity is prevalent in Broch's narrative of the disintegration of values, which, in turn, appears to follow a certain Hegelian Historicism. This third novel of the trilogy consists of five separate parts, three of which are stories taking place in a German city near the Belgian borders and the other two are the story of the Salvation Army Girl in Berlin, which is Bertrand Mueller's journal and then his essay on the disintegration of values. It is Broch's wonderful technique to combine all five narratives as one by integrating the story of Huguenau in the essay, as though Mueller, omnisciently and from afar comments on the life of the people in this small and remote town. Bertrand Muellr, therefore, is Broch's own alter ego. He, along with Broch, is the author of Disintegration of Values. Reading The Sleepwalkers with patience is a joy. Loiter around every page, every line, every word, read them again and again and let them shine their light upon your eyes.