Readers who seek a comprehensive collection of Robert Musil's work - exclusive of his opus, "The Man Without Qualities" - will be well-served by this edition. It contains most of his short stories, some of his non-fiction writings, and most importantly, his first novel, "Young Torless" - an early look at Musil's craft which also introduces us to the themes contained in his later works. The bare plot of "Torless" reads deceptively like one of those bad teen dramas on the WB network: it is the tale of secrets and betrayals among schoolboys, here in the turn-of-the-century Austro-Hungarian Empire. But in Musil's hands, as always, it is a work of deep philosophical ideas; he uses the relationships among the boys to explore the nature of power - how it is gained, how it corrupts, how it destroys. We are required to confront the problem of truth and the fallacy of objective morality. The disillusionment that Young Torless feels when his teacher is unable to explain the theory of imaginary numbers - telling his pupil that he must merely "accept" that they exist - is the same skepticism which Musil and the other modernist writers felt for all ideas, whether science, history, politics or faith. It was through literature that Musil believed that he might bring order to the world, that he might re-create ideas. For any reader who wishes an introduction to the variety of Robert Musil's work, this is a good start.

In these overlooked early stories, the great German Novelist Thomas Mann, best know for his novella Death in Venice, and his massive novel, Magic Mountain (set in Switzerland), experiments with the character of the sensitive (sometimes sickly) artist skittering on the outskirts, or being powerfully pulled in, to romantic and philosophical infatuation. Said to mark the introduction of psychology into romantic fiction, the stories (such as Fallen, 1898, and The Will to Happiness, 1896) were written in the so-called Gay Nineties (the 1890s)--the decade which took with it Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche. In these short stories Mann is playful but works with a precociously masterful touch. His themes are romance, deception, and the limitations of previous literary convention. In one story a desirable actress turns out to be a prostitute, in another a homely woman admired for her mind turns down the artist after he changes his about her desirability,and in perhaps the most powerful story, a most desirable spouse is revealed to be the exact opposite--perhaps. Nietzsche's preoccupation with surfaces, the infinite artistic allure of deception, and the gulf separating the outside world from that of the human mind are deftly handled in these early stories by an acknowledged master of the fictional form.

No doubt the book is a little draggy and you can glean a lot of what Musil wants to say in his earlier more tightly written work. But, read this work (I've read this work twice) with the unpublished posthumous papers and you will get a feel of the vast scale of this masterpiece. If Musil had lived to complete this masterwork the way it would have inveitably turned out, it would have been the greatest novel of the century. It would have been the consummation of European thought of several centuries placed in context of both the first and second world wars...now that's something to think about.

Of all the great European novelists of the first third of the century -- Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, Herman Hesse -- Robert Musil is far and away the least read; and yet he's as shapely as Gibbon, as mordant as Voltaire, as witty as Oscar Wilde and as indecent as Arthur Schnitzler, a fellow Viennese writer who gets more attention. "The Man Without Qualities" is an extraordinary amalgam of the formidable, the delicious and the unfinished; and no doubt each of these attributes is in some measure dissuasive.

If we take it that the characteristics of 20th-century life are fatuity, doubt and confusion; the "barbaric fragmentation" of the self, where "impersonal matters . . . go into the making of personal happenings in a way that for the present eludes description"; a crisis of individual identity and collective purpose -- then it is Musil's astonishing achievement to make a comedy of all this.

The book begins with a baroque meteorological description; its first action is a car accident; the hero is first seen looking out of a window, stopwatch in hand, conducting a statistical survey of passing traffic. Can there be any doubt that it is a prophetic book about our world? Musil is us. The world of "global Austria" in 1913 and "the Parallel Action" -- the plan, in the novel, to claim 1918 for the jubilee celebrating the 70th year of the reign of the Emperor Francis Joseph before the Germans get it for Kaiser Wilhelm's 30th, made nonsense of by the intervention of World War I -- is our world of the United Nations International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and other fatuous schemes. While Musil's contemporaries Proust and Joyce chose interiority and the private world of memory, Musil is uncannily prescient about modern life, where sportsmen and criminals are indifferently idolized, where quantity sits in judgment on quality, so that an author, as Musil puts it, "must have an awful lot of like-minded readers before he can pass for an impressive thinker," where we sit and stew among "bobsled championships, tennis cups and luxury hotels along great highways, with golf course scenery and music on tap in every room." So "The Man Without Qualities" is satire; as one character says, "The man of genius is duty bound to attack." However, it is not harsh satire, nor is it sour. There is something loving about it. Musil's tone is unlike anyone else's. Partly it is the Austrian melancholy that underlies the book, the melancholy of a defunct empire, of a closed conditional: what was to happen did not. WHAT if, the novel implies, instead of expressing itself in the carnage of World War I, human folly had chosen another form? Partly it is the equable irony that plays over every character, institution and group in the book that makes reading Musil such an exquisitely flattering experience. No characters in the book escape mockery -- especially for taking themselves so seriously. All of them are skewed and partial, but none are caricatures; perhaps the book's almost complete lack of physical description plays a part here -- and yet, in spite of that, you feel you could pick them out in a lineup. They are Musil's puppets.

In his early career he wrote stories, plays and novels that had a certain popularity. But none of those prepare a reader for the expanse of "The Man Without Qualities". It took up the last two decades of his life, before he died in self-imposed exile in Switzerland in 1942, at the age of 61. It is a quite overwhelming novel, quite indeed...

I've only gotten through volume l and part of volume ll (so far). I agree that I find it incredible that Musil is not as well known as Proust...he's his equal as a writer and in my opinion a much finer thinker. The brilliance of the book is in the extended introspections rather than the events...the multi-page musings on the human condition illustrate the timeless aspects of what we conceitedly think of as our "post-modern" psychic quandry. In common with Proust we are inside the protagonist's head, but in the third rather than first person, which gives the experience a different feel...we're a little outside at the same time. It's a ghostlier sort of connection, but I think equally as immediate. We walk the streets of Vienna as vividly as Chambray, but, perhaps Ullrich's less romantic nature, I find him a better correspondent. His perceptions are intellectual rather than the sensual, and yet, experiencing that intellect is a sensual experience for the reader (at least for this one!)

A note: I do not think the recent translation compares to the original English one...it may read more breezily, but my brief comparison suggests that it loses a LOT of subtlety in trying to achieve a more colloquial, effortless, less dated narrative voice. For instance, a passage in the original English translation reading "knowledge was beginning to become unfashionable" is translated in the new as "science became outdated". Two totally different meanings, and the first is clearly closer, given the context..(in which Musil is waxing sarcastic about a silly but dangerous bourgeois "believing" fad - spookily portentious of the Hitler era). An incredibly absorbing psychological novel...if your reading time is precious...nothing will reward more deeply or stay with you longer.

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.

A summary of this book is not at all representative for its contains. The background story is at most uninteresting. What made me read this novel was the delicate description of the inside of Ulrich's head. His thoughts are deeply influenced by the troubled times of his pre-war Vienna, as are the reflections of the other main characters. In my opinion, Musil was way ahead of his times, judging by the scientific description of the passions and thoughts of the persons described. The flaw of the book, as I see it, is that he sometimes allows himself to wander too far off with his mind-spins. The result is slightly incomprehensible at times, if not contradictory. You need time to profit from reading this book, but do it.

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.

this 1800 page book has been placed in the same league as "the remembrance of things past" and joyce's "ulysses". if one is not put off by musil's antisemitism, and unnecessarily longwinded, only somewhat interesting, conversations, one is more than rewarded by musil's keen obervational skills and ability to portray highly ideosyncratic, pathological, psychological states. musil is a genius at capturing the subtleties of sexual relations and their consequences. in my opinion, musil lacks the basic humanity of both proust and joyce; the book would be vastly improved if a good editor eliminated a good deal of the tiresome discussions.

Readers will save themselves much unrewarding labor by disregarding both "Precision and soul" and, I daresay, the highly-touted "Man Without Qualities," reading instead his first work "Young Torless" and the stories collected under "Five Women." Musil's derivative philosophical and psychological preoccupations invite inevitable comparisons with Nietzsche and Freud, both of whose work is vastly more durable and fruitful. Despite the powerfully bracing, if not occasionally repellent, astringency of his style, Musil's work subsequent to "Five Women" falls considerably short of his enormous and difficult ambitions which preoccupied his later labors; and, what's more, such a gaping failure of world-historical pretension tends to pollute enjoyments one might otherwise have had in reading it.