Musil's huge, unfinished novel is set in Vienna in 1913, in the final year of peace before the First World War. Ulrich, a clever mathematician in his thirties, takes a year's leave from life to decide what to do with himself. He is drawn into a grand committee planning a patriotic celebration for the Emperor, which becomes an ironic portrait of a society that cannot agree on what it believes. Around him move friends, rivals, idealists and fools, and he forms a close bond with his sister. The book is a comedy of ideas, mixing satire, argument and fine psychological observation. It asks how to live without fixed certainties, and it remains one of the central modern European novels.
Quotes
For what do we do on the Last Day, when the works of humankind are weighted, with three treatises on formic acid, or even thirty? On the other hand, what do we know about the Last Day, if we don't even know what can be done with formic acid between now and then?
Believe me, what makes the human being truly free, and what takes away his freedom, what gives him true bliss and what destroys it, isn't subject to 'progress'--it is something every genuinely alive person knows perfectly well in his own heart, if he will just listen to it!