The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil is on all the prestigious lists for the best magnum opera, from The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read to Le Monde’ Best 100 Novels, to The Bokklubben World Library Best 100 Books of All Time, finally, it is ranked 89th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, and it was compared, placed on the same level with Proust and Joyce…you can find more of my reviews at https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil is on all the prestigious lists for the best magnum opera, from The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read to Le Monde’ Best 100 Novels, to The Bokklubben World Library Best 100 Books of All Time, finally, it is ranked 89^th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, and it was compared, placed on the same level with Proust and Joyce…you can find more of my reviews at https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

 

9 out of 10

 

The man Without Qualities is an impressive chef d’oeuvre, even I can see that, although I must say I had to put it aside, with the (maybe vain) hope that I will find the gumption, zest to start again (soon), after all, why abandon such an acclaimed novel…the first answer is that it has no fewer than 1774 pages, and I only got to about 400

 

On the other hand, that should not be such an impregnable obstacle, after all, I am reading for the second time A La Recherche du Temps Perdu https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/12/le-temps-retrouve-by-marcel-proust.html and that magnum opus has 2400 pages, but the author is nec plus ultra, the greatest novelist

“Truly, it is art that should first reflect the unity of existence and its inner order. But we know the picture art presents today. Fragmentation everywhere; extremes without connections. Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert have already created the epic of the new mechanized social and inner life, while the demonic substrata of our lives have been laid bare by Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, and Freud. We who live today have a deep sense that there is nothing left for us to do."

 

The above quote is from The Man Without Qualities and proves that indeed, this outstanding work of art is the crème de la crème, to show my indignity, I still feel like inserting a shallow, silly irony, if only Robert Musil was limited to lines like that, and for instance spared readers (at least this one) the background…

I mean especially the long chapters on Austria, the frictions with Hungary, the idea of celebrating the monarchy, just as that empire was crumbling, disintegrating after World War I, which gave my country the chance to get almost twice as large, adding Transylvania, the ‘Great Union’, December 1 is the national day now

 

‘Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought. This apparently also accounts for the presence of great philosophers in times of great tyrants, while epochs of progressive civilization and democracy fail to bring forth a convincing philosophy, at least to judge by the disappointment one hears so widely expressed on the subject. Hence today we have a terrifying amount of philosophizing in brief bursts, so that shops are the only places where one can still get something without Weltanschauung, while philosophy in large chunks is viewed with decided mistrust…’

This is yet another clear proof that we have here one of the best books we could read, if only we had the attention needed, Flow https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi.html the psychology classic by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi lists the conditions of Maximum Experience, Being in The Zone: nothing else matters, you are in control, it is an autotelic experience, feedback is constant and instant, time is expanding or compressing, you have clear and meaningful goals, and you stay between boredom and burnout, does The Man Without Qualities check this, evidently, only this reader does not

“But what of "spirit" standing by itself, a naked noun, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? One can read the poets, study the philosophers, buy paintings, hold all-night discussions-does all this bestow spirit on us?0 If it does, do we then possess it? And even if we should, this spirit is so firmly bound up with the accidental form in which it happens to manifest itself”

“It is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character

that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all but one thing: to take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment. This interior space admittedly hard to describe-is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet it is in both places the same: an empty, invisible space, with reality standing inside it like a child's toy town deserted by the imagination.

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – I am on Goodreads as Realini Ionescu, at least for the moment, if I keep on expressing my views on Orange Woland aka TACO, it may be a short-lived presence

Also, maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the benefits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’