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One of Ulrich’s favorite maxims is that reality is just a possibility: everything that happens could have turned out differently. So it is no surprise to him when, almost immediately after he begins his retreat from active engagement with the world, his father, a prominent legal scholar, introduces him to a circle of socialites, aristocrats, financiers, and intellectuals who are nothing less than obsessed with action. They are planning a “great patriotic campaign” to celebrate the seventieth jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef in December 1918. They call it the Parallel Campaign because a similar festival is being prepared in Germany for the thirtieth anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign in the same year. Upstaging the Germans is no small matter, especially as the Parallel Campaign’s director, the benign and elderly Count Leinsdorf, seems constitutionally unable to make a decision without crippling it with dilatory maneuvers. But the ultimate goal is both noble and grand: to demonstrate, with a resounding festival, Austria’s preeminence among nations as a fountainhead of culture, intellect, beneficence, peace, and, why not, military might as well.

Ulrich is appointed the honorary secretary of this cabal, and it is mainly through his eyes that we witness the high-minded pedantry, boondoggle, and oratorical pomp, with a dash of chicanery in the mix, by which its members contrive to get nothing done in their endeavor.

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Ulrich’s year of “vacation from life” begins in August 1913. Sarajevo is just ten months away. Of course he cannot know this. The Parallel Campaign’s designs for a pan-Austrian peace festival will eventuate almost on schedule in the collapse of the empire following Germany’s defeat in a pan-European war. None of the characters in The Man Without Qualities are prepared for the impending disaster.

Does that lead their endeavors and hopes ad absurdum? Not at all. Nothing was further from Musil’s intentions than a grim demonstration of historical necessity, for the simple reason that he did not believe in such a thing. Every one of his characters, even the most foolish and most deranged, is an avatar of possibility. The war itself, even though it actually happened, was no more and no less than that.

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One of the many received notions Ulrich takes pleasure in discarding is that a man—not just any man and not, generally speaking, a woman, but a man of account in the world—must be endowed with qualities for which he is known and by which he knows himself. Ulrich has many admirable and a few unattractive qualities, but they don’t adhere to him, they are not, to his own perception, even tangentially his. Because he commits himself to this paradox and lives authentically within it, he exerts, especially on women, a mysterious appeal that one jealous friend characterizes as the empty glamour of “a man without qualities.” That is a designation Ulrich is happy to accept, and in fact he is that in much the same way that a tightrope walker can be said to be a man or woman without gravity. Ulrich performs, on an often brilliantly funny level of abstraction, the dizzying, high-stakes adventure of divesting himself of all the cultural axioms that support what his contemporaries agree to call “reality,” in order finally to arrive at the great Platonic question, and to ask it in earnest and without flinching: What is the good life—or the holy life, if you will—and how can one live it without self-deception, and without retreating into prerational modes of feeling and thinking, in a world that has lost its passion for the good?