The Man Without Qualities, in Two Volumes: A Sort of Introduction; Pseudoreality Prevails; Into the Millennium; From the Posthumous Papers

x, 725; vi, [3], 730-1774 pp. Translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, An unfinished modernist masterpiece by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. Written over the course of two decades and published in volumes between 1930 and 1943, it is widely considered one of the most important novels of the 20th century. Set in 1913 Vienna on the eve of World War I, the book is a sweeping, philosophical satire that follows a cynical, detached mathematician named Ulrich as he navigates the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This long-awaited translation, the first in English to provide a complete text, brings to its readers the greatest masterpiece in all twentieth-century German literature. Dazzlingly written, ferocious, suffused with a high, ironic intelligence, it uses Viennese high society on the eve of World War I to chronicle the decay and collapse of the entire Old World and, with utter prescience, to explore all that would follow in our Age of Anxiety.