The first volume was published in 1930 a second installment, with greater difficulty, and by subscription, in 1932 (this part, give or take, is Agathe) and a third was being readied for publication in 1938 when Musil pulled it. Musil himself would rather not have published any of it before he published all of it (or whatever he would have chosen to preserve of it), which one can understand, but it didn’t happen that way, and besides, he needed money. The new digital edition is said to top 11,000 pages.
Then again, the whole interconnected extent of the bolus (in the German original) makes it a natural for the Internet and hypertext. It has been plausibly said that “no one has ever read all of The Man Without Qualities.” That is because no such thing exists: it goes beyond what is Gutenberg-possible.
Truly, it’s huge fun and the recent translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike is excellent. It will teach you patience and relish and tolerance, give you a floaty gait and a long view and a permanent half-smile, and acquaint you with a gentle and rather superior form of suspense that you’ll wonder how you ever managed without. Yes, it’s unfinished (“inherently endless,” as Max Brod said of Kafka’s Amerika), and in its published and translated form takes up the thick end of 1,800 pages, by the end of which its knots have started fraying into experimental variants and the poor author’s frantic Post-its to himself, as Musil introduced further characters, adding new factorial numbers of delays and complications and possible outcomes-but it will change your life. If you like difficult amusements and find yourself with a month or two to spare, I would urge you to try (if you haven’t yet read it) The Man Without Qualities by the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880–1942).
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