The Man Without Qualities, set in the waning days of Habsburg Vienna, examines these themes through a collection of eccentric personalities brought together by the Parallel Campaign, a scheme ...

Yet Musil went on to write “The Man Without Qualities,” an achievement that ranked him with Proust and Joyce. It could just as easily have been otherwise, Ulrich, Musil’s antiheroic ...

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES (355 pp.) —Robert Musil—Coward-McCann ($4). An ex-officer of the Austrian army sat down one day in 1922 to write a panoramic novel about the decline & fall of the ...