Word: musil
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...social and moral hollowness. The old Austro-Hungarian aristocracy is going bourgeois, while the middle class yearns to be aristocratic; meanwhile, a muscular and gullible type that Continental writers like to call the "mass man" is pushing his way, for better or worse, to the front of the stage. Musil's satire has a deadpan deadliness. Without a flicker of visible distaste, he simply lets his characters talk themselves into positions of advanced absurdity...
...this bureaucratic farce stands the criminal vitality of Moosbrugger, a murderer and sex maniac. From his many bouts with the law, Moosbrugger has picked up a weird blend of legal and psychiatric jargon, by which he expresses the chaotic resentments which seethe within him-and which, hints Novelist Musil, also seethe within millions of his fellow men. In his deluded fashion, Moosbrugger comes to think that "his whole life had been a battle for his rights." And Ulrich, though his exact opposite, feels a certain sympathy, even a sneaking identification, with Moosbrugger. "If mankind could dream collectively," he says...
...Confident Author. Musil's book is slow and heavy-footed, often bogs down in long passages of abstract speculation about the problems his characters face. In his own fashion, however, Novelist Musil is often sardonically effective. The human soul, he writes, "is simply what curls up and hides when there is any mention of algebraic series." And "at night a man has only a nightshirt on, and what comes next under that is the character." With a kind of pachyderm playfulness, Novelist Musil encourages his characters to blow themselves up-the better to measure their hollowness...
Like the hero of his novel, Robert Musil went through several careers before choosing to become a chronicler of human life. Before he was 35, he was successively a civil engineer, a philosopher and an army officer. Most of his later life was spent in seclusion, writing his book and living on subsidies from a group of admirers who called themselves the "Musil-Gesellschaft." He achieved little fame in his lifetime, but was sure that his book would live...
Some English critics have classed Musil with James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Judging by the translated section, this is too much praise. Musil lacks Joyce's verbal liveliness and inventiveness, Proust's sensitivity to the most subtle gradations of social rank. More important, he lacks the creative spontaneity and abundance which mark their work. Where they were artists who sometimes felt a need to write as philosophers, Musil reads like a philosopher who felt a need to write as an artist...