ROBERT MUSIL (1880-1942) was an Austrian-German novelist and essayist, a central figure in the modernist movement best known for his monumental unfinished novel THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES.
Musil spent his teenage years at military boarding schools and those experiences are reflected in his first novel, THE CONFUSIONS OF YOUNG TÖRLESS (1906) -- here presented in three translations. During his university studies, he studied engineering by day but at night read literature and philosophy, particularly Ernst Mach and Friedrich Nietzsche. ON MACH'S THEORIES (1908) is his published dissertation on Mach's philosophy of science, while the influence of the latter is clearly evident throughout Musil's mature work.
He worked tirelessly for more than twenty year on his masterpiece, THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES [Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften] (1930-43). Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, the novel deals with the moral and intellectual decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the eyes of the book's protagonist, Ulrich, an ex-mathematician who has failed to engage with the world around him in a manner that would allow him to possess qualities and who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. The 1995 translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike was the first to present Musil's complete text in English, including draft chapters and notes that remained unpublished during his lifetime.
POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A LIVING AUTHOR (1936) is a collection of exploratory pieces, short stories, and reflections. THOUGHT FLIGHTS (2009) presents additional texts from Musil's Nachlass, including material originally published in journals, newspapers, and magazines, as well as literary fragments and heretofore unpublished texts. Musil explores the psyches and lives of himself and his contemporaries with illuminating insight, vividly evoking the secrets, challenges, and mundanities of interwar life in cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin.
His DIARIES, a distillation of forty-three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that details the moods of artistic adventure. Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence.
The following books are in PDF and/or ePUB format as indicated:
== FICTION ==
* Confusions of Young Törless (Oxford Worlds Classics, 2014). Translated by Mike Mitchell. -- ePUB
* Confusions of Young Törless (Penguin, 2001). Translated by Shaun Whiteside. -- ePUB
* Five Women (Godine, 2010). Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. -- ePUB
* Flypaper (Penguin, 2011). Translated By Peter Wortsman. -- ePUB
* Man Without Qualities, The (Vintage, 1996). 2 vols. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. Note only this PDF edition contains 600+ pages of draft chapters and posthumous papers, which the ePUB version omits. -- PDF
* Man Without Qualities, The (Picador, 2017). Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, with Introduction by Jonathan Lethem. -- ePUB
* Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (Archipelago, 2006). Translated By Peter Wortsman. -- PDF + ePUB
* Thought Flights (Contra Mundum, 2015). Translated by Genese Grill. -- PDF [sample]
* Young Törless (Pantheon, 1955). Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. -- PDF
== NON-FICTION ==
* Diaries, 1899-1942 (Basic Books, 1999). Selected, translated, annotated, and with a Preface by Philip Payne; edited and with an Introduction by Mark Mirsky. -- PDF + ePUB
* On Mach's Theories (Philosophia Verlag, 1982). Translated by Kevin Mulligan, with an Introduction by G. H. von Wright. -- PDF
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