a review of mark m. freed’s robert musil and the nonmodern

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities has taken a while to achieve recognition as a modernist masterpiece. This could be because it doesn’t quite fit with our orderly models of what ‘the modern’ might mean. The trouble is, Musil wasn’t Joyce, nor Proust, and to weigh up his book as some Germanic answer to Ulysses or A la Recherché du Temps Perdu is to miss its point. Or rather, its lack of one. Because, however many times you read this famously unfinished novel, one thing’s for sure: you’ll never fully take the measure of its pointlessness. It’d be a stretch to say that the text makes sense of itself, let alone of ‘modernity.’ Rather, its freewheeling narrative propels it somewhere beyond the familiar aims of modernist art. For unlike those others, this book doesn’t want to build systems, to give order to memory or history, or to shore up anything much against its ruins. Instead, it lets those ruins remain as they are: incomplete, enigmatic, never entirely intelligible.

read the rest at Open Letters Monthly