The Robert Musil group has ended. Professor Pike will return to the Mercantile Library

Center for Fiction in Fall 2008 to lead a group on the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

About the Group

Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities (1924-42) is recognized as one of the monuments of the modern novel, and one with special appeal to readers of the 21st century. This new reading group will focus on the problems Musil raises in his novel and on the characters, who embody all the complexity of living people perplexed at how to live ethically in a fragmented culture and society. Musil takes the paralyzed old Austrian Empire in 1913 as representative of European culture in decline and crisis. The questions he raises are still very much with us today. Course led by Professor Burton Pike.

More about The Man Without Qualities

The Man without Qualities overarching theme is the decay and collapse of the Habsburg Empire on the eve of World War I. Robert Musil’s satirical portrait of Viennese high Society during this period of decline is brilliantly exposed through the eyes of his detached hero, Ulrich: an ex-soldier, scientist and seducer--a man without qualities. Through his unique creation, Musil analyzes many of the psychological and social problems that are still facing us today, in what Professor Pike has called "an extraordinary human document that combines precision and soul."

Professor Pike, commenting on his own experience of The Man without Qualities, describes it as a novel that "doesn't let you go - you start to see his characters in the people walking and talking around you." And of the author, he writes "Trained as a scientist, Musil wrote a new kind of literature that we are coming to appreciate as a window toward the future rather than as longing for the past."

About Burton Pike

Burton Pike was editorial consultant on the 1995 Knopf translation of The Man without Qualities and translator of "From the Posthumous Papers" in that edition. He was awarded the Medal of Merit in 1992 by the City of Klagenfurt, Austria, for his work on Robert Musil and has contributed to, edited, and co-translated a number of Robert Musil works. His translations of prose and poetry from German and French have appeared in Fiction, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Chicago Review, and other magazines. He is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and German at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.