Though largely ignored during his life, Robert Musil is recognized alongside Joyce, Proust, and Kafka as one of the great fiction writers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his massive unfinished work The Man without Qualities (Book I, 1930; Book II, 1933; unfinished portion published posthumously in 1943), a wide-ranging vision of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so innovative in its form that some hesitate to label it a novel. The book’s protagonist makes a go of being a soldier, engineer, and working in mathematics before setting himself on a journey seeking both truth and the means to reconcile intellect and feeling. ...Musil’s vast fresco was an attempt to understand the convulsed landscape of the postwar world and the second great war to which it would lead in his own lifetime. By looking resolutely over his shoulder, he showed as few artists of his century have the path ahead. The extraordinary freshness of his vision suggests that the issues he grappled with...are, under the guise of postmodernism, no less urgent for us. VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don Delillo’s White Noise.