Volume 6, Number 9 · May 26, 1966
Musil
By Denis Donoghue
Five Women
by Robert Musil, translated by Eithne Wilkins, translated by Ernst Kaiser
Delacorte, 222 pp., $5.00
The five women are Claudine, Grigia, Frau von Ketten, Veronica, and Tonka. Their stories were first told in Vereinigungen (1911) and Drei Frauen (1924), now splendidly translated in one volume. The book fills the gap in Musil's fiction between Young Torless (1906) and The Man Without Qualities, unfinished at the author's death in 1942. But for the existence of Young Torless it would be possible to think of the short stories as experimental work, but Musil's first novel is such a finished production, such a completely realized thing, that the notion of an experiment in the stories must be rigorously qualified. He was not an apprentice in 1911. It is necessary to say this because in many other respects the short stories are indeed experimental. They are, for instance, moral experiments. Hence they are not only illuminating in themselves but the cause of illumination in The Man Without Qualities.
Review, 2913 words
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