SOURCE: "The Stupendous Cannot Be Easy: On Robert Musil," in A Mania for Sentences, Chatto & Windus, 1983, pp. 23-33.

In the following essay, Enright considers Musil's achievement as both a thinker and a fiction writer.

If you were to read The Man Without Qualities for the story, your patience would be much fretted: you would probably not hang yourself, you would merely want to hang Robert Musil. The 'story' of the novel ostensibly concerns the preparations being made in 1913 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Emperor's accession in December 1918. The preparations are known as the Collateral Campaign because Germany, that uncomfortable neighbour, is also planning a celebration: of Kaiser Wilhelm's jubilee, thirty years on the throne, in July of the same year. Unfortunately July precedes December, hence honour requires the Austrians to turn the whole of the year 1918 into a jubilee. Since, as the...