L’Homme sans qualités

Hailed as “an ambitious attempt to portray the adventures of the human mind in our modern world” (D. Frey), this unfinished novel presents a man without qualities — that is, without distinguishing traits, “a floating being open to every possibility”; a man endowed with a sense of the possible who, in the writer’s own words, “will not say: here this or that has happened, will happen, or must happen; but will imagine: here this or that could or should happen; and when told that something is as it is, he thinks it could just as easily be otherwise. Thus the sense of the possible might simply be defined as the ability to think everything that could ‘just as well’ be, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.” Musil thus paints an ironic portrait of a “world of qualities without men.”