There are few novels greater at diagnosing the breakdown of ideals and values within the glossy international or as interesting of their look for a fashion out of the morass of doubt and depression. enormous is by way of a ways the easiest descriptor of Musil’s impressive fictional exploration of the fashionable panorama. The Austrian writer struggled for almost 20 years to manage his ever-expanding fictional universe, finishing merely approximately half what he meant his novel to turn into. In 1920, the undertaking had 159 xiv+626_novel100. indd 159 5/17/10 1:43:44 PM 160 the radical a hundred the identify Der Spion (The Spy), later replaced to Der Erlöser (The Redeemer) and Die Zwillinsschwester (The dual Sister). each one identify mirrored subject matters, personality, and plot advancements ultimately fused in a proliferating, all-encompassing constitution in pursuit of an elusive cohesion. via 1927 Musil arrived on the fi nal name, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The guy with out features) and a multipart plan for the unconventional. the 1st sections have been released in 1930 and a moment quantity seemed in 1933. A perfectionist and continuous reviser, Musil wrestled together with his ungainly manuscript in the course of the upward thrust of the Nazis, which expense him monetary aid within the dying of his German-Jewish writer. Musil used to be exiled from Vienna to Switzerland whilst Hitler annexed Austria, and he died in Switzerland in close to destitution in 1942, having fi nished just a couple dozen extra chapters seeing that 1933. even though it is very unlikely to check how Musil may have resolved and concluded the numerous strands of his huge, immense venture, he left tantalizing clues, because the fresh English translation of the radical by means of Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike with its six hundred pages of drafts and fragments exhibits. Destined to continue its fractured, open-ended shape, the fellow with no characteristics nonetheless instructions cognizance for what Musil controlled to complete: one of many novel’s so much formidable experiments in totally shooting not just an period however the multifarious complexity of contemporary existence and idea within which such the most important innovations as self, attractiveness, and love are deconstructed and reformulated in methods by no means ahead of tried through a novelist. An encyclopedic landscape of fi n-de-siècle Vienna, the fellow with out characteristics is decided throughout the year prime as much as August 1914. As in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the cataclysm of battle is the inevitable, ironic end for Musil’s contemplation of a society at the breaking point. back, like Mann, Musil diagnoses the diseases of eu lifestyles through an observer protagonist pulled out of his regimen to permit a attention of necessities. The reader is first and foremost thrust into the maelstrom of urban existence, Musil’s metaphor for the fragmentation and disunity the radical will divulge and try and resolution: “Like all tremendous towns it was once made up of irregularity, swap, ahead spurts, mess ups to maintain step, collisions of items and pursuits, punctuated via unfathomable silences; made of pathways and untrodden methods, of 1 nice rhythmic beat in addition to the power discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms.