Posthumous Papers Of A Living Author

(Paperback)

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From one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, these chiseled essays and sketches written between 1920 to 1929 are playful, moving, exploratory and full of soul and humor. In playful reflections on art and humanity, Musil describes a fly's tragic struggle with flypaper, the guests in a Roman boarding house, the laughter of a horse and more.

Reviews

Musils linguistic facility the merging of aim, manner and result is virtuosic. Hes such a consummate stylist that after him Kafka may seem immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious and Walter Benjamin hermetic. . . . Peter Wortsmans translation is splendid, succeeding . . . in capturing this authors unique combination of quizzical authority andaustere hedonism. New York Times Book Review

Musils originality of mind and perfectionism of temperament are evident throughout these pieces, which range from delicately enameled miniature portraits of the natural world . . . to casual yet trenchant little essays and parables on art, culture, kitsch, psychoanalysis, and even feminism. Christian Science Monitor

What sense might Musilian evoke Perhaps a tense equilibrium between an exhilarating philosophical intelligence and a certain emotional detach- ment; between a powerfully curious imagination and a soldierly stoicism; between a Viennese worldly skepticism and a mystics yearning to penetrate to a mysterious second life. Philip Lopate

Funny, sad and true or rather funny because they are both sad and true such observations are, to use a typical Musil phrase, a form of daylight mysticism, shafts of light in a darkening world. Chicago Tribune

Author Bio

Robert Musil (1880-1942), born in Vienna, was trained as a mathematician, behavioral psychologist, engineer, and philosopher. During WWI, he served as an officer in the Austrian Army on the Italian front. He died exiled and impoverished in Switzerland in 1942. Author of The Man Without Qualities, Young T rless, and Five Women, Musil is one of the towering pillars of twentieth-century modernism. Recipient of the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die- Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, the recent memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin- A Rhapsody in Gray, and the forthcoming novel Cold Earth Wanderers. His translations from the German include Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures, Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Peter Altenberg's Telegrams of the Soul, and Tales of the German Imagination- From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, published by Penguin Classics.