Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister

(Paperback)

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From the author of 'A Man without Qualities,' a novel about spirituality in the modern world. From the author of 'A Man without Qualities,' a novel about spirituality in the modern world. Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the so-called "man without qualities" who is the major character in Robert Musil's great, unfinished novel of that name. Ulrich is intellectual and skeptical and rebellious and yet for all that rule-bound, held hostage by his attraction to the systematic, even if every existing system-political, ethical, metaphysical-strikes this onetime mathematician as fundamentally suspect. When, however, after many years Ulrich and his younger sister, Agathe, reunite over the bier of their dead father, a celebrated lawyer, both siblings are electrified. They are, for one thing, almost each other's spitting image, while Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more resistant to any kind of status quo than her brother. Engaging in a series of ever more intense and questioning "holy conversations," brother and sister progressively enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, and identity, seeking to arrive at a new conception of reality that they are sure lies within each other to discover. Musil's Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister is one of the most unexpected and breathtaking adventures of twentieth-century fiction, while Joel Agee's new English translation captures all the nuance of Musil's famously acute and penetrating style.

Reviews

Shortlisted for the 2020 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translators Prize

"Agatherepresents a kindof concentrate of the quests and questions of its monumental source material: in it, as George Steiner oncewrote about part three of the original novel, what was previous a kaleidoscope narrows to a laser. . . . Musilssentences are never less than elegant (a handsome precision reflected in Joel Agees translation). JulianEvans,The Daily Telegraph

"In Agees vividly contemporary and sensuous translation, Agathe zeroes in on a quasi-mystical adventure in living and loving." Lisa Appignanesi, The New York Times Book Review

[A] valuable addition to modernist European literature. Kirkus

Incredibly erotic. BBC4's Saturday Sounds

Musils writing is so disciplined, his word choice so exact, that sentence follows sentence with a pointedness that seems to come naturally.J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

Musil, as much as Joyce, is an intensely personal and domestic bard, although all great writers can of course be seen, or can see themselves, as prophets of political doom, civilizations collapse.John Bayley, The New York Review of Books

Author Bio

Robert Musil (1880-1942) is the author of The Confusions of Young T rless, Five Women, The Man Without Qualities, and The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. His works were banned by the Nazis, and he and his Jewish wife went into exile during World War II. He died of a stroke in 1942. Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has received several prizes, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 2008 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist's verse play Penthesilea. He is the author of two memoirs--Twelve Years- An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear. His translation of Prometheus Bound was produced at the Getty Villa in 2013 and is published by NYRB Classics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.