SOURCE: "The Man with Extraordinary Qualities," in The New York Times Book Review, April 10, 1988, pp. 28-9.

In the following review, Heilbut outlines Musil's main characteristics as a writer and thinker as evidenced in the essays and fiction collected in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.

Since so little of Robert Musil's work is available in English, this collection's appearance is a major literary event. A congeries of light sketches, composed for Austrian and German newspapers between 1913 and 1929, it was compiled in 1935 when Musil was still living in Austria. But it was first published a year later in Switzerland, the country he fled to in 1938 following the Anschluss. So often ahead of his time, the archivist of social estrangement seems to have anticipated this exile. By 1935 he was both impoverished and horrified by Austrian politics. His audience, never large, had been reduced to a small group, predominantly Jewish and...