Musil, (Joseph) Roth, and Hammett

David Whish-Wilson got me reading Joseph Roth, and from there it was a short leap to Robert Musil.

The Man Without Qualities (1930-1942) is not a crime novel, but bits of it will interest crime readers (and I haven't even got to Moosbrugger yet):

"THIS man who had returned home could not remember any time in his life that had not been animated by his determination to become a man of importance; it was as though Ulrich had been born with this wish. It is true that such an urge may be a sign of vanity and stupidity; it is no less true, however, that it is a very fine and proper desire, without which there would probably not be many men of importance.

The only snag was that he did not know either how one became such a man or what a man of importance was. In his schooldays he had taken Napoleon for one; this was partly out of youth’s natural admiration for criminality..."

These aren't bad, either:

"It is a fundamental characteristic of civilisation that man most profoundly mistrusts those living outside his own milieu..."

and

"For some time now such a social idée fixe has been a kind of super-American city where everyone rushes about, or stands still, with a stop-watch in his hand."

and

"Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs..."

I noticed, too, that Roth and Musil, those acute witnesses to the traumatic birth of modern Europe, make their astonished remarks about the noisy vitality of American cities in precisely the years (1922-1930) when Dashiell Hammett was perfecting hard-boiled crime fiction, an urban-based genre if there ever was one.

*

The Man Without Qualities was on the reading list of a course I took in college on the twentieth-century European novel. How any 18-, 19-, or 20-year old, much less one as callow and stupid as I was at the time, can be expected to appreciate such a book is beyond me. I think Musil was the one author the class never got around to reading. At least I might have been able to appreciate its outrageousness and jokes, as I did for The Confessions of Zeno and Journey to the End of the Night.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012