the man without qualities best translation

The book opens with an almost God's-eye view: ``A barometric low hung over the Atlantic.

This novel marks Musil, albeit unwittingly (he hated Joyce and loved the 19th- century Russian novelists), as the high priest of German modernism (see Arno Schmidt's Collected Novellas, p. But the real protagonist is a dying culture, represented by Vienna. Meanwhile, he's obsessed with the celebrated case of a mass murderer named Moosbrugger (M, Fritz Lang's famous film, was similarly obsessed).

In 1932, Musil wrote in a notebook about this never-ending project: ``What the story that makes up this novel amounts to is that the story that was supposed to be told in it is not told.'' The closest thing to a human protagonist is Ulrich, the so-called man without qualities, a skeptic who views with irony the Austro-Hungarian Empire's attempts to match the patriotism of the newer German state on its border.

Begun in the early 1920s, the first volume was published in 1930 and remained unfinished when Musil died in 1942. That Vienna is the setting of this most celebrated of seldomly read novels, released in a new translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike and available in its entirety for the first time in English. Tumultuous, manic, and loosed from its traditional moral and spiritual moorings, Vienna was a fertile breeding ground not only for genius but also for defensive provincialism and, ultimately, fascism. It was also, as the hub of the last Habsburg Empire, the rotting, living-dead core of ancien-rÇgime Europe. Your translation would stand for decades.Vienna, on the eve of WW I, home to Freud, Mahler, and Wittgenstein, was the apex of European civilization. Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities because a) outside the Anglosphere it's recognised as a masterpiece inside, it's barely recognised at all, and b) because it's so long and would be so expensive to translate. Is there a particular book you would like to translate? The idea that, even after his arrival, his flight continues, is super sad. He escapes and flees back home, but by the time he gets there, his home country no longer exists. Joseph Roth's Die Flucht Ohne Ende, because the conceit is so powerful: an Austro-Hungarian officer is captured by the Russians during the First World War. Which German book do you like the best and why? Particularly if you know by experience that most good writing is necessarily not originally done in English, translation becomes something of a duty, even if all you're doing is prodding a few little holes into the edifice of British parochialism. I grew up speaking German and that probably made me assume that translation, fiction and criticism were aspects of the same interest. Why did you choose to become a translator? He studied German and History at Somerville College, Oxford, and now lives in London. His debut novel, The Beast, is published by Head of Zeus in September 2017. Alexander Starritt is a novelist, translator and journalist.

The man without qualities best translation