The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil · 1930
The great unfinished novel. Musil's sprawling, essayistic masterwork follows a man trying to find a project that will define him while Vienna falls apart before WWI. The prose is philosophical, precise, funny, and fundamentally uncertain. Its incompleteness is, at this point, part of the meaning.
The case against
Unfinished is the kind word: Musil rewrote for twenty years and died still revising, and the Parallel Campaign satire makes its point by page two hundred, then makes it for nine hundred more. The essay-chapters stop the story whenever it threatens to move. You could spend two months of your remaining reading life here, and the book will simply stop, not end.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
