Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Reading Order

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1930–43) by Robert Musil is the great unfinished novel of the twentieth century — a thousand-page torso that Musil worked on for nearly three decades and never completed, published in two volumes (1930 and 1933) with posthumous chapters appearing after his death in 1942. Ulrich, a mathematician and man of thirty-two who has temporarily suspended his identity to see what will happen next, is appointed Honorary Secretary of the Parallel Campaign — a committee tasked with finding an appropriate way to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's reign in 1918, the year everyone knows (the reader, if not the characters) will mark not the Empire's celebration but its dissolution. Musil's comedy is among the greatest in twentieth-century fiction: the Parallel Campaign's deliberations are a sustained satire on the Austrian bureaucratic mind, on Viennese culture, on the failure of European civilization to find a purpose worthy of itself. But the novel is also a philosophical essay in narrative form: Ulrich's 'essayism' — his refusal to commit to any quality or identity until he has fully examined what quality or identity would mean — is both the novel's method and its subject. The second volume introduces Agathe, Ulrich's sister and double, and the novel moves into a mystical register — the 'Other Condition' in which Ulrich and Agathe explore the possibility of a unified, boundaryless experience of the world — that remains incomplete at Musil's death.