The Man Without Qualities

Tight, clean and unmarked-" The third volume of the four-volume Picador translation of the novel. This book is subtitled Into the Millenium (The Criminals), remained unfinished, and was published posthumously."-" "Musil, given his desperate personal situation and the Nazi takeover in Germany, compares his continued work on The Man without Qualities to the diligence of a woodworm, boring through a picture frame in a house that is already ablaze? Close to the end of this unfinished tome, Ulrich muses about the condition of modern life wherein we are presented with so many raw facts and feelings that theories arising from them from every direction can appear equally valid, none having a monopoly on the truth: Does man act only according to his emotional impulses, does he only do, feel, and indeed think, that to which he is impelled by unconscious streams of longing or the milder current of pleasure, as is nowadays widely assumed to be the case? Or does he perhaps, after all, act according to reason and will--as is also widely assumed today? Is he particularly at the mercy of certain impulses, such as the sexual, as is nowadays assumed? Or at the mercy not of sexual preconditions, but of the psychological effect of economic conditions, as is also assumed? He concludes in a typical non-conclusive way: An organism as complex as a man can be regarded from many sides, and one can choose one or the other axis in the theoretical picture: what one gets is partial truths, out of the interpenetration of which truth slowly rises higher. Or does it really rise higher? Every time a partial truth has been taken for the sole explanation of things, there has been a heavy price to pay. On the other hand, nobody would have arrived even at the partial truth if it had not been over-estimated. So the history of truth and the history of feeling is in many ways interlinked, but that of feeling remains obscure. Indeed to Ulrich's way of thinking, it was not a history at all, but a wild tangle."- Jimmy