Robert Musil Books In Order

Young Torless

‘Musil belongs in the company of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka.’ The New Republic

Like his contemporary and rival Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil boldly explored the dark, irrational undercurrents of humanity. The Confusions of Young T rless, published in 1906 while he was a student, uncovers the bullying, snobbery, and vicious homoerotic violence at an elite boys academy. Unsparingly honest in its depiction of the author’s tangled feelings about his mother, other women, and male bonding, it also vividly illustrates the crisis of a whole society, where the breakdown of traditional values and the cult of pitiless masculine strength were soon to lead to the cataclysm of the First World War and the rise of fascism. A century later, Musil’s first novel still retains its shocking, prophetic power.

The Man Without Qualities

Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation published in two elegant volumes is the first to present Musil’s complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

‘Peter Wortsman’s translation is splendid, succeeding better than any I’ve read in capturing this author’s unique combination of quizzical authority and austere hedonism.’ Anthony Heilbut, The New York Times Book Review

From one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century come these chiseled essays and sketches written in the 1920s. Exploratory, quirky, full of soul and humor. Reprint of the Eridonos edition, 1987.

Five Women

The Austrian Robert Musil 1880 1942, a central figure in the modernist movement, is known primarily for his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities. But here, in these five stories stories as crucial to the understanding of The Man Without Qualities and Musil’s immense literary influence and significance as Joyce’s Dubliners is to Ulysses, he displays another face, one that is by turn extravagant, sensual, mystical, and autobiographical. As Frank Kermode notes in his preface, these stories ‘are elaborate attempts to use fiction for its true purposes, the discovery and regeneration of the human world.’ In that redefinition of fiction, Robert Musil’s name is writ large.

Five Women has gone through three printings as a Godine Nonpareil book. We are now proud to reissue it as the newest edition to the Verba Mundi library of modern world literature.

Diaries 1899-1942

For the first time in English fresh insights into the mind of one of our century’s great novelists.

Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and James Joyce for his monumental, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. His Diaries, a distillation of forty three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first hand historical document of life in twentieth century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer’s notebook that details the moods of artistic adventure.

Readers will gain keen insights into Musil’s passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence.

‘ The American publication of Diaries is an important cultural event for which everyone involved with the project deserves our gratitude.’ Los Angeles Times

‘It is as if a private library has been now opened to public use and benefit.’ Washington Times

Precision and Soul

‘We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little precision in matters of the soul.’ Robert Musil

Best known as author of the novel The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote these essays in Vienna and Berlin between 1911 and 1937. Offering a perspective on modern society and intellectual life, they are concerned with the crisis of modern culture as it manifests itself in science and mathematics, capitalism and nationalism, the changing roles of women and writers, and more. Writing to find his way in a world where moral systems everywhere were seemingly in decay, Musil strives to reconcile the ongoing conflict between functional relativism and the passionate search for ethical values.

Robert Musil was born in 1880 and died in 1942. His first novel, Young T rless, is available in English. A new two volume translation by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins of The Man without Qualities is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.

‘Now we have these thirty one invaluable and entertaining pieces, from an article on ‘The Obscene and Pathological in Art’ to the equally provocative talk ‘On Stupidity,’ which, with a new translation of The Man without Qualities forthcoming…
amount to a literary event for the reader of English comparable to Constance Garnett’s massive translation of Chekhov’s stories.’ Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune