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A review by frasersimons
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
Unsurprisingly, this unfinished book never really comes together. It’s experimental and interesting, easily digestible, concerned with modern modernity’s effect in man. It’s not that surprising that it’s seems well loved. Especially with the mammoth effect, where people seem to want to ascribe a lot more value to things they spend a lot more time on, and finish, like huge novels such as this.
Interestingly, my major gripes are similar to The Brothers Karamazov, which has similar very long-winded diatribes on philosophical notions. But the actual fiction suffers to it because the authors pay no mind to time and place during these many, many outings. Especially in regards to time, people will launch into speeches that would literally take hours upon hours to conclude, with generally no back-and-forth, and it’ll have been during the course of an appetizer. It becomes abundantly clear that this is even worse than all that, as this is less concerned with plot than other Idea books (certainly Brothers K, which has a large plot component, even if it’s overlong).
This is where the experimental components come in. Kind of like the newest effort from McCarthy, the path of the novel is more on a meta level, with the notions of certain things evolving. But they don’t actually get anywhere, because it can’t, as it’s not got an even remote conclusion. Nor would it have had had it been finished, because many of the concerns are questions that don’t have definitive answers. And the ones that do, the books one-note characters completely miss anyway. My favourite is when they talk on, what essentially amounts to moral relativism, as these authors seem to always want to do. As if there is no way to quantifiably see how morals work because they’re social constructs.
There are metrics that are very plain and easy, but always eschewed by people pontificating. Do your decisions, does your society, remove agency from other people? What is the disparity in wealth? What is the general health? How does it treat the disenfranchised? It’s not as though this was written in the medieval ages, it was begun in 1980s if I recall correctly. The characters going into the same musings and coming to shallow thoughts like they do is inexcusable for a book of ideas. It’s unsurprising that there’s a thick not of misogyny that runs through it as well, then.
The women are poorly written and the narrative constantly makes asides of poor conceived judgment on women and their so-called natures, with a laughable gesture at equality near the end when it shows them persecuted for having the same sex drive as a man, and being judged for it. Had it not been constantly undermined and dominated by male voices projecting their feelings as empirical evidence as to how women function, perhaps it would have been more palatable.
What’s more is that, unfortunately, it’s all very forgettable as well. The delivery is oiled well enough, but it’s hard to recall any conversation that makes a significant impact because there is no book-end to the delivery, nothing to ground the discussion or the idea to anything else. It’s a non-stop train where the discussions are nothing more than the trees a passaenger notices whipping by on the way to more trees upon trees upon trees. And the passenger never actually reached anywhere, so the trip is completely unmemorable.
Interestingly, my major gripes are similar to The Brothers Karamazov, which has similar very long-winded diatribes on philosophical notions. But the actual fiction suffers to it because the authors pay no mind to time and place during these many, many outings. Especially in regards to time, people will launch into speeches that would literally take hours upon hours to conclude, with generally no back-and-forth, and it’ll have been during the course of an appetizer. It becomes abundantly clear that this is even worse than all that, as this is less concerned with plot than other Idea books (certainly Brothers K, which has a large plot component, even if it’s overlong).
This is where the experimental components come in. Kind of like the newest effort from McCarthy, the path of the novel is more on a meta level, with the notions of certain things evolving. But they don’t actually get anywhere, because it can’t, as it’s not got an even remote conclusion. Nor would it have had had it been finished, because many of the concerns are questions that don’t have definitive answers. And the ones that do, the books one-note characters completely miss anyway. My favourite is when they talk on, what essentially amounts to moral relativism, as these authors seem to always want to do. As if there is no way to quantifiably see how morals work because they’re social constructs.
There are metrics that are very plain and easy, but always eschewed by people pontificating. Do your decisions, does your society, remove agency from other people? What is the disparity in wealth? What is the general health? How does it treat the disenfranchised? It’s not as though this was written in the medieval ages, it was begun in 1980s if I recall correctly. The characters going into the same musings and coming to shallow thoughts like they do is inexcusable for a book of ideas. It’s unsurprising that there’s a thick not of misogyny that runs through it as well, then.
The women are poorly written and the narrative constantly makes asides of poor conceived judgment on women and their so-called natures, with a laughable gesture at equality near the end when it shows them persecuted for having the same sex drive as a man, and being judged for it. Had it not been constantly undermined and dominated by male voices projecting their feelings as empirical evidence as to how women function, perhaps it would have been more palatable.
What’s more is that, unfortunately, it’s all very forgettable as well. The delivery is oiled well enough, but it’s hard to recall any conversation that makes a significant impact because there is no book-end to the delivery, nothing to ground the discussion or the idea to anything else. It’s a non-stop train where the discussions are nothing more than the trees a passaenger notices whipping by on the way to more trees upon trees upon trees. And the passenger never actually reached anywhere, so the trip is completely unmemorable.