Ten immortal works in the history of the novel

The evolution of a novel stems from myth and oral epic to flow towards the crucial moments like the great novels of the 19th century or capital 20th century works: for example, Robert Musil’s ‘The man without qualities’. Reality blends in with fiction, the characters assert themselves more powerfully than in real life, and exhilarating passages of imagination redirect expertise and knowledge of memory

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El hombre sin atributos

ROBERT MUSIL

Editorial Seix Barral. Barcelona, 2004. Translated by Feliu Formosa and Pedro Madrigal

Masterpiece of a lifetime, like Proust’s In search of Lost Time or Joyce’s Ulyses, Musil’s The man without Qualities is a novel closer to essay writing, left unfinished after his death in 1942, set shortly before the Great War and the collapse of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire –referred to “Kakania” in the novel– ironic and philosophical reflection centre of the extraordinary Musilian work.