Fetch The Man Without Qualities Showcased By Robert Musil Accessible In Document

found that my glasses perfectly fit over Robert Musil's head on the cover of my paperback




WHAT IT IS LIKE

For those yet to try this famous novel you can get an idea of what its like by putting a metal bucket over your head and getting a friend or partner or your children to bang on the bucket for thirty minutes or so using a very sophisticated spoon.


It must be a spoon encrypted with all the subtleties of psychology and indented with the complex analyses of the five major sciences and the handle should be engraved with great mathematical formulae and the coats of arms of the major aristocratic families of the AustroHungarian Empire.

To complete the demonstration the spoon banger should, during the banging, read out alternating verses of T S Eliots The Fire Sermon and George Formbys hit “Why Dont Women Like Me”

After the suggestedminutes you will have got a reasonable idea, and you can then decide if you wish to proceed with reading the actual book.


Another way of putting it might be to imagine you are in a large room where hot air blowers are blowing thousands and thousands of very intellectual feathers over you, feathers which stick in your hair and clothes and tickle your nose and make you sneeze to the point where you cant see the door anymore.


AN ATTEMPT TO PRESERVE MY SANITY

I decided early on that I would limit myself to VOLUME ONE, aroundpages of thispage unfinished workpages were published in Mr Musils lifetime and anotherpages were later kindly supplied by his widow.


My dear friends, Volume One was enough for me for now, I may crack on with volume two in another ten years or so, maybe twenty, It is on my todo list, but rather low down, between learning Sanskrit and getting a spiderweb neck tattoo,

THE ELUSIVE GOLDEN TAMARIN



So what we have here is a strange lumbering beast, There is not much story to be had, and readers have been known to gasp out loud when they turn a page to see actual dialogue on the next page.
Sadly, it is as rare a sight as the golden tamarin in the forests of Brazil, So instead of plot and dialogue what we mostly have here is bucketfuls of character and deluges of musings, Pages and pages. This main guy Ulrich has a thoughtful turn of mind, Hes a richyear old mathematician and we are in Vienna in, just before the roof fell in on this elaborate aristocratic world he floats around in,

WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY THIS IS A NOVEL OF IDEAS

When I say that Ulrich and the narrator like to philosophise, I mean this kind of thing :

all moral events took place in a field of energy the constellation of which charged them with meaning, and they contained good and evil just as an atom contains the potentialities of chemical combination.
They were, so to speak, what they became, and just as the one word hard describes four quite different entities according to whether the hardness relates to love, brutality, eagerness or severity, so the significance of all moral happenings appeared to him the dependent function of others.
In this manner an endless system of relationships arose in which there was no longer any such thing as independent meanings, such as in ordinary life, at a crude first approach, are ascribed to actions and qualities.
In this system the seemingly solid became a porous pretext for many other meanings what was happening became the symbol of something that was perhaps not happening but was felt through the medium of the first and man as the quintessence of human possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his own existence, materialised as a record, a reality, and a character, confronting man in general.


If you are still reading, this massive book is the novel you have been waiting for your whole life,
But its not all like that, no,

WHAT THE HELL A DEAD CAT!

Ulrich gets involved with a very dull business called the Parallel Campaign, which is a committee of great ones to celebrate theyear reign of Emperor Franz Joseph.
Just when you are thinking “how dull is this book going to get” Musil suddenly throws a dead cat onto the family Christmas dinner table, in the form of a guy called Moosbrugger, who is a sex murderer.
Blam just like that in the middle of all the tinkling chandeliers and the ptarmigan brain pate we are contemplating a very gruesome crime, and the novel begins to talk about curiously modern issues.
For instance, this Moosbrugger is a prototype Gary Gilmore, insisting that he be executed when the lawyers are trying to get him pardoned, And then the whole issue of diminished responsibility is debated,

This Moosbrugger part is an excellent strategy, setting off the glittering jawbreaking hoity toity parties with this hideous dose of human misery, The two realities lie side by side on the readers plate,

MASSIVE PATIENCE REQUIRED

I think Musils greatest fans would have to admit that he is asking massive patience from readers and the stuff about the committee to celebrate Austria is deadly dull.
BUT there are always always glints of gold in the bleak granite, Musil suddenly breaks out a great turn of phrase or wicked oneliner, You never know when hes going to do it! He can be really funny, He isnt often enough for me but he can do it when he feels like it,

A great many people today feel themselves antagonistic to a great many other people,

Yes, Robert they do ! They do !

the tenderer feelings of male passion are something like the snarling of a jaguar over fresh meat he doesnt like to be disturbed.


Walter smiled like a fakir preparing not to bat an eyelash while someone runs a hatpin through his cheeks

Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three in Baedecker

that last one could almost be Raymond Chandler!

And a summing up of our whole human dilemma :

Permit me to say that were in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, while the present moment is felt to be unbearable too.



STUMBLING INTO THE LIGHT

Musils prose is so dense at times its like he wanted to be the black hole of literature, sucking every subject into his novel and not letting anything out again.
Its some kind of monumental achievement, all right, but just as surely its not for most readers, It took me forever just to get through volume one and I humbly salute all those great readers who made it to the end,

Obviously this is a five star masterpiece but I was only intermittently in love with it, so three from this churlish reviewer, Ovo je bukvalno i figurativno najveće delo koje sam pročitao, Ima preko hiljadu i po strana, ali se osećam kao da sam pročitao deset puta toliko, I još nije završeno, nažalost ili na sreću autor je izgleda planirao još mnogo stotina, možda hiljada stranica, Zahteva mnogo vremena i truda, mnogo traži ali još više daje, Žanr: filozofski roman rečenice su dugačke, a zaplet zamršen, Stvarno ima mnogo filozofiranja mnogi bi rekli i previše ali više otvara pitanja nego što daje odgovore na njih, Glavni lik, čovek bez osobina, je ironičan i poprilično ambivalentan prema svemu, Mnogo više teksta je posvećeno razmišljanju i raspravama nego događajima, tako da su likovi razrađeni do najsitnijih detalja iako ih autor veoma često koristi da bi izneo svoje filozofske misli.
U knjizi ne dominira nijedna tema a neke od njih su čula i emocijie, moral i krivica, ljudski duh i duh vremena, religija i nauka, ljubav, rat i mir i još mnoge druge.

Delo sam otkrio preko Goodreadsa, gde mi je preporučen jer sam čitao roman Čarobni breg Tomasa Mana kome je vrlo sličan po stilu i koga čak i nadmašuje.
Retko remekdelo, i više od toga, A comic novel. A modern novel. A novel of ideas and more, This is without a doubt my favorite novel and one that both encapsulates and foreshadows the the development of the modern condition, Musil's scientific mind is able to present a humanistic view of the world of Ulrich and the rest of the characters that inhabit this novel, Continuously inventive and invigorating for the reader, the writing is so precise and the argument Musil makes about Ulrich and his situation so intricate that it is intellectually and aesthetically involving even before it becomes emotionally so.


On rereading Musil I have come to an appreciation of why he may have found it so difficult to complete the project, for his protagonist, Ulrich the man without qualities was so definitely a man who considered the unlimited number of possibilities before acting.
As Musil said, "What is seemingly solid in this system becomes a porous pretext for many possible meanings, . . and man as the quintessence of his possibilities, potential man,"p,the task before him must have seemed daunting, The result he left thousands of pages of manuscript unfinished, unedited, unpublished at his death,

At the end of the first volume of The Man Without Qualities Ulrich has just learned of his father's death and is seen heading for the train station to return home to attend to his duties.
This is an ending of sorts, at least for this seven hundred page prelude to the remainder of the novel, It is a prelude that includes introductions to a roster of characters who, unlike Ulrich, portray characteristics that place them definitely inVienna where we find most of them participating in a centennial celebration referred to as the 'Parallel Campaign'.
Beside this campaign we also see glimmerings of the rise of the 'new' Germany that would emerge after the Great War which remains only, an unmentioned, possibility,

Through the whole of the first volume Ulrich both meditates internally and interacts with the other characters regarding the nature of this world and its activities and, most importantly, the possibilities facing him the 'what if' or subjunctive nature of life.
This can be summarized briefly as a discussion of the difference between the precise measurement of the modern scientific view of man and the imprecision of the artistic or more spiritual view.
The society presented in the novel is particular, yet universal and in that society Ulrich is the most universal individual, As the first volume of this rather uneventful story edges toward its close suddenly several events erupt to bring some of the action into focus, These lead to a moment where Musil brings Ulrich and the reader face to face to contemplate "the narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings,", This mode of thought may give one the "impression that their life has a 'course' that is somehow their refuge from chaos, " p.Or we may believe that it is not an impression, but a reality made through our creation of our own life through our actions and influences "Man is not a teaching animal but one that lives, acts, and influences.
" Goethe. I'm not sure how I made it to the end of this windbag of an unfinished novel, Especially given it bored me on practically every page, Musil reminds me of a fascist dictator with his megalomania, his swaddled love affair with the sound of his own voice, It's commonly referred to as a novel of ideas, Often code for a novel of talking heads bereft of plot or credible characters, I can't say there were many ideas, if any, which blasted forth a kindling of sunlight, I'm not even sure I could tell you what any of these ideas are, I thought the The Man Without Qualities's most popular quotes here might provide some illumination, The most liked on Goodreads is this The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents.
Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian, . . He's bound to lose perspective, "
Is that an idea that has enriched our culture It sounds clever Musil's greatest talent is sounding clever, at implying

he has all the answers, It's also a novel hailed as a pioneering work of postmodernism, Yet architecturally it couldn't be more commonplace, Of course there is brilliance, It wouldn't be a book that's still read if there wasn't, "For it is only criminals who presume to damage other people nowadays without the aid of philosophy, " But I'd say the brilliance occupies about fifty of the novel'spages, There's also the sense that this novel would never have been finished even had Musil lived another twenty years, As is the case with all fascist dictators I can't imagine him ever shutting up,

I now know my answer if anyone asks me what I think the most overrated novel hailed as a masterpiece is,
This is a life changing work by a life changing author, Musil inspires without trying to inspire, is wise without preaching, In the mold of Aurelius, disguised as a novel, most of those hundreds of pages are quotable, Reminds me of Dostoevsky very much, but their styles are very different,

It is easy to see why his work was quickly forgotten after his death, A world racing madly towards consumerism and self gratification, in the name of all sorts of ideologies, will not understand and genuinely appreciate Musil,

On reading, Musil has this to say:
"Hardly anyone still reads nowadays, People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement, "

Anyone who could provide such an insight is worth rereading many times over, Inizio l'anno così: terminando una lettura lunga, probante, audace e tremendamente complessa, Personaggi vari maschili e femminili, questi ultimi particolarmente interessanti e contemporanei, interpreti di varie realtà e di prospettive: "L'uomo senza qualità" è un romanzo caleidoscopico che restituisce l'impasse dell'uomo e cittadino novecentesco alle soglie della prima guerra mondiale, un uomo Ulrich sopra tutti alla ricerca dell'Assoluto, del Totalizzante, della Perfezione, dei propri confini liquidi e della fusione di sé col mondo verso l'ambizioso obiettivo dell'Estasi in continua tensione platonica e poca praxis, alla ricercadefinizione e continua riformulazione del concetto di uomo, di amore, di giusto e sbagliato, di mondo e di colpa, di debolezza e di istinto, di isolamento e contatto, di tutto.
C'è tutto in questo romanzo, Un romanzoinfinito rimasto incompiuto ma che nell'incompiutezza trova la sua reale chiusura, Immagino Musil e lo immagino scrivere ancora e ancora fino alla fine, e avrebbe continuato ancora e ancora, se la fine non fosse stata nel ', Un romanzo infinito perché infiniti gli spunti di riflessione, nel tempo e nella Storia, soprattutto per un uomo pieno di qualità, qual è in realtà quello di Musil, ma vittima dell'intellettualismo dei tempi, dell'inettitudine pragmatica, di interrogativi e di risposte che deflagrano in nuovi interrogativi e nuove risposte e così all'infinito.
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