The Musil Diaries: Robert Musil, 1899-1942

The Diaries of Robert Musil are a secret look into the life and mind of a writer whose fiction embodies one of the twentieth century's daring leaps of consciousness. Ranked with Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in the pantheon of European modernists, Musil attempted to apply the precision of his scientific training to the utmost bounds of the imagination. In a series of notebooks kept through most of his literary career, Musil reflected, often through stunning epigrams, on his childhood, his erotic life, his methods of creative thought and his fellow writers. An indispensable guide to his fiction, essays and plays, the pages of the diaries provide a skeleton key for his complex unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Known for extreme personal reticence among his contemporaries, Musil in the diaries (which were never intended for publication), speaks nakedly of himself and the chaotic events he lived through.This selection from the diaries is based on the exhaustive 1976 German edition prepared by Adolf Frisé. Most of its sketches, anecdotes and personal reflections have been translated into English. An acute political and cultural observer, Musil recorded in these pages his experiences of Berlin at the outbreak of World War I and service in the Austrian army on the Italian Front. The last notebooks chronicle Hitler's rise to power and Musil's exile in Switzerland. The diaries are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's workbook that details the moods of artistic adventure.In the diaries Robert Musil challenged himself to think about a reality beyond the world that could be apprehended by logic, to entertain the possibilities of forbidden eroticism, to imagine the hidden mystical life of Fascist Europe, and to turn the question of sexual gender into the puzzle of identity.\nAmazon.com Review\nBorn into an affluent Austrian family in 1880, Robert Musil died penniless 62 years later, a solitary, bitter man who felt his genius had gone unrecognized. Certainly Musil's name is not nearly as well known as those of his contemporaries Marcel Proust, James Joyce, or Thomas Mann; still, the old man's shade might take some comfort in the critical and popular response his unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, has garnered in recent years. Its latest, 1995 translation revived interest in an author many consider one of the greatest--if least read--writers of the 20th century. Readers who want to know more about the man behind The Man are in luck: Robert Musil's Diaries are now available in English.
Musil was an inveterate diarist; while the German edition of his journals is comprehensive, its translator and English-language editor, Phillip Payne, has chosen to be more selective. Gone are entries that summarize or excerpt the work of other authors; those that are "unintelligible to all but Musil experts"; early drafts of works that are not of particular interest; or entries that add little of significance to our understanding of Musil's life or work. What's left, however, is more than adequate, and provides a fascinating window into the life, times, and creative process of a literary master. There are Musil's working notes to himself ("Set up at least 100 figures, the main human types in existence today: the Expressionist, the Courths-Mahler, the profiteer, the psycho-pedagogue, the disciple of Steiner, etc. Then have these figures crossing each other's paths"); comments about his world ("My generation was anti-moral or amoral because our fathers talked of morality and acted in a philistine and immoral fashion ... children today are moral, but want people to take morality seriously"); and meditations on the most private aspects of his personal life (discussing his wife, Martha, he writes, "She isn't anything that I have gained or achieved; she