Exhuming Robert Musil: A Fresh Look at The Man Without Qualities

Essay by Ted Gioia

The novel of ideas is dead. Of course, we never read the obituary. It was one of those deaths that is hushed up, kept out of the newspapers. It happened around the time Moses Herzog started writing those crazy philosophical letters to dead people. Ideas, once the gold standard of the “serious novelist” – ah, the very phrase seems so qu…