Dance Around an Egghead

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, VOL. II (454 pp.)--Robert Musil--Coward-McCann ($5).

To modern Europe's greatest novelists, including Proust. Mann and Joyce, European culture is a dying patient at whose bedside they have arrived too late. Societies in rigor mortis also fascinated Robert Musil, a little-known Austrian ex-army officer, who began dissecting the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1922 in a novel called The Man Without Qualities, and kept at it until he died 20 years and 2,000 pages later. U.S. publishers of the book are releasing one-fifth of it at a time (the first installment appeared last year--TIME, June 8, 1953). It is a fascinating book, but rather special, and perhaps best taken in small doses.

The mock hero of The Man Without Qualities is a thirtyish intellectual named Ulrich. an egghead so tired that he is little more than a spiritual shell. Echoing his nihilism is a chorus of earnest buffoons: a Prussian millionaire who yearns to be an ethical superman, a general who is a kind of military Mortimer J. Adler and wants to classify all the world's great ideas, a beautiful but muddled matron who thinks the quickest trip to heaven is on a cultural broomstick. Author Musil perches them all on the lip of a volcano--the years 1913 and early 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I.

The plot concerns a so-called "Collateral Campaign" to celebrate the Austro-Hungarian Emperor's 70th jubilee. The campaign grinds along like a slow bus to nowhere. Committees beget committees, pressure groups stall each other in what one critic described as the dance of rainmakers who have lost their magic. The ruling class sketched by Author Musil has lost not only its magic, but its faith in God, its fear of the Devil and its confidence in itself. It has opinions but no convictions, techniques but no principles, ideals but no beliefs. In short, its troubles may be more timely than at first appears. Author Musil can be dreary, but at his best his aphorisms are bright, brittle icicles. Samples:

P: "Every age in which everything was permissible had made those living in it unhappy."

P: "One can actually say in advance that the progress that is really made will always be precisely what nobody wanted."

P: "[The] whole era ... had newly developed a strong religious tendency, not as the result of any religious destiny, but merely, as it seems, out of a feminine and irritable rebellion against money, knowledge and calculation, to all of which it passionately succumbed."

P: "Truth is not a crystal one can put in one's pocket, but an infinite fluid into which one falls headlong."

P: "Writing, like the pearl, is a disease."

Author Musil clearly suffered from the disease of writing. Fortunately, he also had the medicine of thought.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.