If at first you don’t succeed … give up!

Book: The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
Translated from: German (Austria)
Genre: Classic Novel
Rating: between 4 and 8 out of 10; impossible to say!

My first shot at TMWQ was almost twenty years ago. Fifty pages into it I knew it was my kind of book. One hundred pages in and I was losing my way. I put it aside for later. Returning to it a couple of years later, the experience was identical. And the patern continued again and again with the passage of time; each times I abandoned it, but not definitively. I had the feeling it was a book that could please me a lot. Here’s a revealing line from it:

one thing … could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it.

Some months ago, in compiling a list of books for different occasions, I selected TMWQ for the honour of one book you’ve been meaning to read. Then it made it to the status of new year resolution.

Sadly, the saga ends here. After 800 pages, I’ve abandoned again. I can’t see myself getting back to it; it’s too big an undertaking.

So how was it? Great, amusing, provocative, ironic and dull by turns. The English, presumably consistently with the original German, is beautiful but not exactly vernacular. I found myself reading passages from it to friends and family and recording a page-full of them here in my blog. But it was too long and frequently too dull or, perhaps, too learned for me and so it’s official: I’m moving on with my life. It has been compared with James Joyce’s Ulysses and it has received the same fate on my bookshelf.