Short stories by a modernist master, the author of The Man Without Qualities.
Best known for his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil is a central figure in the modernist movement, as important to the development of 20th-century literature as Joyce, Kafka, Mann, or Proust. In Five Women–a book as crucial to the understanding of The Man Without Qualities as Joyce's Dubliners is to Ulysses–he displays a face that by turns extravagant, sensual, mystical, and autobiographical.
“..elaborate attempts to use fiction for its true purposes, the discovery and regeneration of the human world.” - Frank Kermode
“In his descriptions of love affairs and especially in the portraits of women in love, Musil is truly original; in managing scenes of physical love, he has not been approached by any writer of the last fifty years.” - V. S. Pritchett
"Intensely sensual and thick with eroticism, these beautifully written stories ultimately resist reduction. Their true concern is erotic love itself, not its object." - New York Times
"Unions [part of Five Women] is one of the most beautiful and impressive books of experimental fiction written this century." - London Magazine
Musil continues to be an author of extremely profound literary influence and significance and these stories, translated from the German, are an ideal entry into his world.
