Packed with incisive essayistic excursions, explorations of chance, traffic accidents, pathology, probability and the weather, along with extravagant characters, picaresque sexual encounters and a rebellious questioning of love, gender and morality in a world then newly abandoned by God, “The Man Without Qualities,” which is set in 1913 and runs nearly 2,000 pages, has a contemporary flavor. Musil’s scientific background is undoubtedly what gives his great human comedy its singular aspect. He’s a character so ironical, so open to possibility, that no attributes stick, certainly not long enough for him to develop the kind of passionate conviction that, Musil makes clear, the worst in his time are prone to. It could just as easily have been otherwise, Ulrich, Musil’s antiheroic protagonist, might have interjected. Yet Musil went on to write “The Man Without Qualities,” an achievement that ranked him with Proust and Joyce. Neither Musil seems a likely candidate for the role of novelist, even in that hotbed of modernism that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire during its dying liberal decades. Then there was Musil the philosophical scientist, interested in probability theory and logical positivism, as well as in the workings of the mind and the soul. First there was Robert Musil the mechanical engineer, who invented a chroma meter, a device for evaluating color.
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