Volume 46, Number 5 · March 18, 1999
The Man with Many Qualities
By J.M. Coetzee
Diaries 1899-1941
by Robert Musil, selected, translated, annotated, and with a preface by Philip Payne, edited and with an introduction Mark Mirsky
Basic Books, 557 pp., $40.00
Born into the autumn of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and died halfway through the even worse convulsion that followed. Looking back, he would call the times in which he lived an 'accursed era'; his best energies were spent on trying to understand what Europe was doing to itself. His report is contained in a huge unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities; in a series of incisive essays collected in English under the title Precision and Soul; and in a set of notebooks newly translated as Diaries 1899-1941 (1899- 1942 on the jacket, however).
Review, 5775 words
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