Mini-Review: Robert Musil

They say that Robert Musil is the Viennese Proust. But I’ve never heard anyone say that Marcel Proust is the Parisian Robert Musil. Perhaps no one dares: Musil’s Man Without Qualities surely ranks high on the list of unread masterpieces in world literature.

I took a copy of Volume 1 of the two-volume Vintage edition of MWQ on my Eastern European excursion. What with two transcontinental plane flights, plus a 12-hour layover in the Frankfurt hauptbanhof (don’t ask--but see at right) I actually got through it.

Short verdict: Proust it’s not. It’s a an absorbing, probably even an important, book. It bears some noteworthy similarities to Proust. Each is long; each was the lifework of an author, left incomplete at the author’s death, which perhaps would never have been completed even if the author had lived. Each attempts to comprehend the whole of a society. And perhaps most important, each is perhaps not so much a novel as a section of loosely-connected essays, individually inspired by commonplace incidents.

But from there on, the comparison becomes somewhat invidious. For Musil, whatever his merits, isn’t nearly the artist that Proust is. A good many of his mini-essays are suave and subtle. Others are simply too clever by half, and others just fall flat. Many of the best of them verge on the edge of satire; the worst come closer to sarcasm, and pretty leaden, at that.

Many have remarked on Musil’s skill at characterization. On this score, I’d say that Musil does offer one really remarkable achievement: his portrayal of Moosbrugger, the brute and half-wit who kills a prostitute. It’s the kind of challenge that puts a novelist on his mettle: the main point of someone like Moosbrugger is that he is inarticulate, and the novelist is last person in the world equipped to deal with the inarticulate. I suppose you could say that Russell Hoban did it in Riddley Walker. Or maybe the more apt comparison is what Tolstoi did with the wolf in War and Peace. Anway, it’s a rare achievement and for Musil, a real one.

Aside from that, I’d say he is less successful. The general is well realized, but again, pretty much on the level of satire. Soliman the black servant is original and arresting. Rachel the house maid is sympathetic and convincing, but not nearly so richly textured as Proust’s Françoise. Others, particularly the women, tend to blur.

A more devastating criticism addresses the larger matter of atmosphere. When you read Proust, you feel Paris (or at least a slice of it) in your blood and bones. I read about Musil’s Vienna partly in Vienna, and it still isn’t as vivid to me as Proust’s Paris can be.

I shouldn’t go overboard here. I tend to be distrustful and impatient with novels; unless they catch me fairly early, I tend to set them aside (I don’t really finish very many). I hung on here for 725 pages, so I must have found something worth my while. Indeed when I found something that impressed me, I noted a page number on the back flyleaf: I filled a page with those little chicken scratches: it looks like I have 40 or more.

But this is only the first 725 pages. There are another 400 pages in the other volume, not to mention a full 640 pages of “posthumous papers.” I don’t think I’ll be getting to all them real soon. On the other hand, if I’m ever again stuck in the Frankurt hauptbanhof…