The Man Without Qualities: Or, Another Thing I’m Forcing Myself to Do

This is the second volume.
Buy this after you buy the first

I’m not sure where I’ve developed this compulsion to finish media that I clearly have no interest in, but along with Dragon Age: Origins, I’ve also been trudging my way through Robert Musil’s gargantuan The Man Without Qualities, a two volume novel that comes in at a minimum of 1,100 pages and a maximum of 1,700 pages (there’s an appendix of chapters and ephemera that wasn’t published during Musil’s lifetime. It’s part of my two volume set, but they way things are going, I’m not sure if I’m going to engage in the bonus material). It’s really strange when I consider that during school, when I was actually required to read things, I often wouldn’t. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that, though I can bullshit my way through an essay, I can’t really bullshit myself.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true, is it? I can very easily bullshit myself, but I usual reserve the effort of doing so for much grander things. I’m in big trouble if I start using my powers of self-delusion for minutiae like finishing an early 20^th century Austrian novel.

Plus, I wouldn’t really get much out of reading the Cliffnotes (if such a thing exists) for this book. The plot, as it is, doesn’t really amount to too much. Granted I haven’t finished the book, but I am over 800 pages into it, and I can pretty safely assume that this isn’t really a plot driven work. Rather, it’s one of those philosophically driven things: much more concerned with themes and thoughts and possibly characters. It seems to be scraping quite desperately at a concern for the intersection of mysticism and religion on the one end and science and technology on the other. So the main character is a mathematician, though that’s really only dealt with in the abstract rather than passages detailing his efforts to… do whatever mathematicians do. Actually, he doesn’t really seem to do much, which may be sort of the point. It’s like a much more verbose version of Camus’ The Stranger, except no one gets killed.

I’m into the second volume of the book and my progression has slowed to an absolute crawl. I was never really into the novel, as you can probably tell, but I made the mistake of taking a break between the first and second volume and now I just don’t care. My plan, when I finished the first volume, was to read Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” a novella that I discovered I had a copy of after totally forgetting I purchased it. But before I could finish that, I went to the public library, got myself a library card and checked out Atlas Shrugged for four weeks. I’m not going to get into why (as I’ve touched on it in a post from one of my other blogs), but taking a breaking up one exhausting work with another didn’t really help. Now, whenever I plop down on the couch to read, I get a few sentences in and fall right to sleep. This book takes dedication, and probably a less horizontal position.

Unlike Dragon Age, I feel obligated to read this book less out of a monetary commitment, and more out of misplaced anticipation. I forgot where I first heard about The Man Without Qualities, but I picked up a copy from the University Library a while ago, started it, seemed to enjoy it, but then got distracted pretending to read things that I was supposed to for school. So, when I noticed that someone had maddeningly donated the second volume to the library that I worked at, and that we weren’t going to add it, I bought it anticipating that I would someday find the first volume used to complete the set at a reasonable price. That was, like, two years ago. Every time I went into a used book store, I looked for the first volume to no-avail. It became rather ridiculous: here I had the enormous second volume of a work that I couldn’t even start. Sure I’ve got plenty of books on my bookshelf that I’ve never read, but I’ve made the decision not to start them. Not so with this. I couldn’t start it.

  

This is the first volume.
Don't buy this.

For two years, I looked at that second volume with mounting frustration. Finally, when I got a gift card for Barnes & Noble this past Christmas I decided, fuck it I’m going to buy the first volume. Incidentally, though the second volume cost me one dollar, the first volume cost me over 20. Thank god, I can finally get this Musil monkey off my bookshelf. Unfortunately, it didn’t really take me that long to realize that I really wasn’t enjoying the book that much. Sure there’s some biting satire and whatnot, but it’s just… really long… and really boring. But now that I’m invested I can’t bring myself to just abandon all my efforts and anticipation. After all, I bought it (okay, it has a little to do with a monetary commitment) and damnit I’m going to finish it. Then I’m going to keep it on my shelf and think, man, that was a monumental waste of time.