Volume 33, Number 20 · December 18, 1986
On the Edge of Revelation
By J.M. Coetzee
Five Women
by Robert Musil, translated by Eithne Wilkins, by Ernst Kaiser, preface by Frank Kermode
David R. Godine/Nonpareil Books, 222 pp., $8.95 (paper)
In 1924 Robert Musil published a collection of stories entitled Three Women, the spinoff of his work on a novel about the last years of the Hapsburg Empire that began to appear, in installments, in 1930: The Man Without Qualities. For readers daunted by this most essayistic of novels, full of thinking, empty of ideas (because, to its author, it was the mark of a poet to be open to ideas but to hold none), unfinished and perhaps unfinishable, a novel that asks its central question—what Europe is to believe in now that it has ceased to believe in history—in a mode of irony and artifice, Three Women may provide a more convenient introduction to the mature Musil.
Review, 2733 words
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