The great failed masterpiece

At the third attempt, I am finally making headway with "The Man Without Qualities", the much cited, seldom read, great novelistic project by Robert Musil. There are many flashes of brilliance, and the prose, at its best, has a hard edged dryness and elegance, but there are also many dull patches, full of philosophical digressions and a kind of all pervasive irony, which often feels heavy handed and obscure. It may possibly work in german but it is definitely lost in translation. "The Man Without Qualities" was written in the twenties and thirties when the novel, as a literary genre, was at its most ambitious. Musil seemingly wanted to fully capture a time - the Austria-Hungarian monarchy in 1913 - and its ethos, precariously perched between science and soul, and full of foreboding of the explosion to come . The action advances slowly, going nowhere. The characters think a lot but seldom act. Was this the situation of the empire, in a kind of stasis perpetuated by the figure of Francis Joseph, one of the longest serving rulers in the history of Europe? Still, you keep going: not entranced but intrigued by the mounting tension, afraid of missing out on something important.