Diaries, 1899-1941

by Robert Musil

The Diaries of Robert Musil are a secret look into the life and mind of a writer whose fiction embodies one of the twentieth century's daring leaps of consciousness. In a series of notebooks kept through most of his literary career, Musil reflected, often through stunning epigrams, on his childhood, his erotic life, his methods of creative thought and his fellow writers. An indispensable guide to his fiction, essays and plays, the pages of the Diaries provide a skeleton key for his complex unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. In the Diaries Robert Musil challenged himself to think about a reality beyond the world that could be apprehended by logic, to entertain the possibilities of forbidden eroticism, to imagine the hidden mystical life of Fascist Europe, and to turn the question of sexual gender into the puzzle of identity.