Today no one would dream of describing a human being in such grandiose terms—a political program, perhaps, or a space mission, but not a person, and certainly not a writer. It may have something to do with the expectations writers have of themselves, and with a rather diminished sense, generally, of the human spirit having any sort of destiny. Perhaps it’s better that way. A more modest perspective may open up a vision of what is staring us in the face: that unless we supply the essential necessities to the collective body of man, the spirit may have to find another planet for the fulfillment of its destiny. Musil himself was coming to a similar conclusion near the end of his life (chastened, perhaps, by the enormity of the Second World War and by his own experience of severe poverty): “The most important thing is not to produce spiritual values, but food, clothing, security, order. . . . And it is just as important to produce the principles necessary for the supply of food, clothing, etc. Let us call it—the spirit of privation.” Elsewhere he described himself as “building a house of cards as the earth begins to crack.”

The house of cards was a huge, phenomenally ambitious construction, more than twenty years in the making and never finished, titled The Man Without Qualities—a satire on the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a utopian novel about untried possibilities of being, a meditation on the nature of history, a critique of the major ideologies of the twentieth century, an attempt to combine the different exactitudes of reason and mysticism. The book, a critical success after its first volume was published in 1930, was virtually unknown at the time of the author’s death in 1942. Today it is frequently mentioned along with Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time as one of the great modern novels.

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The term “novel” bears a great deal of stretching. Randall Jarrell’s witty definition—“a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it”—seems designed to fit most if not all cases. But The Man Without Qualities does not match that description because it appears to be intent, from the beginning, on subverting narration itself. As soon as a lively scene or dramatic incident threatens to turn into a story, a train of reflection comes along to interrupt it. Some of these digressions exfoliate in the protagonist’s brain or issue from his mouth in lengthy soliloquies, others accompany his reflections as a kind of meta-commentary, still others play themselves out in his absence, describing the mental and emotional states of other characters, or detach themselves entirely from the novel’s plot to disport themselves freely in a chapter or two of their own.

But perhaps the idea of narration bears some stretching as well. Essay, in this quintessentially essayistic novel, is the mode for depicting a mind so active that it nearly constitutes a character independent of the man whose mind it is. That man is a thirty-two-year-old Austrian mathematician known to the reader only by his first name, Ulrich, who, disillusioned in his quest for intellectual glory after reading in a newspaper about a racehorse of genius, decides to take a year-long “vacation from life,” which he conceives of as an experiment in pure philosophic contemplation—“living essayistically,” he calls it—in the hope of perhaps, by that pathless route, discovering an occupation better suited to his abilities. If he does not find it within a year, he will put an end to his life, because, to his fanatically logical and consequent mind, an unjustified life is not worth living.