SOURCE: "Unions (1911)," in Robert Musil: An Introduction to His Work, Cornell, 1961, pp. 57-70.

An American critic and educator specializing in German literature, Pike is the editor of Robert Musil: Selected Writings (1986) and Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses of Robert Musil (1990). In the following excerpt, he discusses Musil's "expressionistic" narrative technique in Unions, finding it more successful in The Completion of Love than in The Temptation of Silent Veronica. Elsewhere in Musil criticism the title The Completion of Love has been translated as The Perfecting of a Love.

[The two stories in Unions]—called "novellas" (Novellen) on the cover of the first edition and "two tales" (zwei Erzählungen) on the title page—present two attitudes toward love between the sexes, the yea-saying and the nay-saying. These works might best be characterized as attitude studies rather than character studies. The heroine of the first story is a sensualist...