miércoles, 8 de junio de 2016

The Man Without Qualities Readalong


We'll get back to ye olde book review business soon.  In the meantime, just wanted to invite the more book fiendish among you to consider joining Frances of Nonsuch Book, Anthony of Time's Flow Stemmed and moi in a readalong of Austrian Robert Musil's simultaneously amusing and cerebral modernist masterpiece The Man Without Qualities in June, July and August this summer.  This famously open-ended doorstopper, which clocks in at a whopping 1130 pages in the standard incomplete theatrical release and some 1770 pages in the director's cut spliced together after Musil's demise, has been canonized by the Wall Street Journal as "the third member of the trinity in 20th-century literature, complementing Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past" and lauded by Thomas Mann for sporting "without doubt the greatest writing, ranking with the finest our epoch has to offer"--and that's just from the blurbs on the front and back covers!  Due to the size and scope of the tome, I personally intend to tackle writing about it in bite-sized chunks sometime during the last week of each readalong month; if you care to read along with us, though, please feel free to conform to your own schedule and post or don't post as you like.  Until then, pseudoreality prevails!


3 comentarios:

  1. I tried reading this earlier in the year, and see I got to page 60. Re-reading the first paragraph, I can maybe see why I gave up. Will try to read some Spanish (perhaps Catalan) stuff though for the other affair.

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    Respuestas
    1. Oh, and reply to your comment on my blog some time too; - blog, like reading, has really fallen apart of late.

      Borrar
  2. Funny, that first paragraph always makes me laugh!

    Happy to have you on board for Spanish Lit Month, of course. Cheers!

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