Musil Diaries

Diaries: 1899-1941 by Robert Musil
Mirsky, Mark (edt); Frise, Adolf (edt); Payne, Philip (trn); Mirsky, Mark (int); Musil, Robert

Basic Book / Perseus (Paperback, 1999)
First Printing. ISBN: 9780465016518

Condition: clean sound copy. Sunned spine, one vertical crease down front cover, prelims.


About:
Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and James Joyce for his monumental, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. His Diaries, a distillation of forty-three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that details the moods of artistic adventure.Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence.

Review:Born into an affluent Austrian family in 1880, Robert Musil died penniless 62 years later, a solitary, bitter man who felt his genius had gone unrecognized. Certainly Musil's name is not nearly as well known as those of his contemporaries Marcel Proust, James Joyce, or Thomas Mann; still, the old man's shade might take some comfort in the critical and popular response his unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, has garnered in recent years. Its latest, 1995 translation revived interest in an author many consider one of the greatest--if least read--writers of the 20th century. Readers who want to know more about the man behind The Man are in luck: Robert Musil's Diaries are now available in English.

Musil was an inveterate diarist; while the German edition of his journals is comprehensive, its translator and English-language editor, Phillip Payne, has chosen to be more selective. Gone are entries that summarize or excerpt the work of other authors; those that are "unintelligible to all but Musil experts"; early drafts of works that are not of particular interest; or entries that add little of significance to our understanding of Musil's life or work. What's left, however, is more than adequate, and provides a fascinating window into the life, times, and creative process of a literary master. There are Musil's working notes to himself ("Set up at least 100 figures, the main human types in existence today: the Expressionist, the Courths-Mahler, the profiteer, the psycho-pedagogue, the disciple of Steiner, etc. Then have these figures crossing each other's paths"); comments about his world ("My generation was anti-moral or amoral because our fathers talked of morality and acted in a philistine and immoral fashion ... children today are moral, but want people to take morality seriously"); and meditations on the most private aspects of his personal life (discussing his wife, Martha, he writes, "She isn't anything that I have gained or achieved; she is something that I have become and that has become "I"). Robert Musil's Diaries are a remarkable portrait of the artist throughout his life and a standing testimony to his genius. --Alix Wilber

About the Author:
Robert Musil (1880-1942) spent much of his life writing The Man Without Qualities, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. Mark Mirsky is the editor of Fiction magazine, and runs the creative writing program at the City University of New York. Philip Payne is Professor of German Studies at Lancaster University and Head of its Department of European Languages and Cultures.