Robert Musil
By:
November 6, 2009
What do you do when you’re ROBERT MUSIL (1880-1942), when you’ve been nominated for a Nobel prize, when you live in abject poverty because you refuse to compromise, when you’re plagued by the success of “mediocrities” like Thomas Mann, when said mediocrities ignore your moods and set up your fan clubs, when you capture turn-of-the-century Vienna at its most contradictory and brilliant, when the world you’re writing sweeps past you, eradicating your beautiful, complicated, many-chaptered dance of possibilities with blood, steel, and the terrible weight of modernism’s negative spaces — all which were absolutely predicted and embodied by your magnum opus? Maybe you call Hollywood. Featuring the nobrow dyad of Ulrich and his sister Agathe, Musil’s Man Without Qualities is a musical comedy of ideas. Characters break out into a lecture every other chapter; the different positions swirl around like Julie Andrews in a mountain meadow. Ulrich works on the Parallel Campaign, a government project of Seinfeldian absurdity, which ultimately remains as unfinished as the book, its multiple options tailing off into parallel campaigns of their own, its intended conclusion reaching back to the past and preventing its own discovery. I’m thinking Baz Luhrmann. But Aaron Sorkin, let’s talk.
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