The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften; 1930–1943) is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the late Austrian writer Robert Musil. It is typically considered to be one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century.


The novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's last days, and the plot often veers into allegorical dissections on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society, though the book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and so no one single theme dominates.