Agathe
Or, The Forgotten Sister
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- US$11.99
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- US$11.99
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From the author of 'A Man without Qualities,' a novel about spirituality in the modern world.
Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich. Beginning with a series of increasingly intense “holy conversations,” the two gradually enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, identity, and understanding in pursuit of a new, true form of being that they are seeking to discover.
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is perhaps the most profoundly exploratory and unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister reveals with new clarity a particular dimension of this multidimensional book—the dimension that meant the most to Musil himself and that inspired some of his most searching writing. The outstanding translator Joel Agee captures the acuity, audacity, and unsettling poetry of a book that is meant to be nothing short of life-changing.
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In this intriguing amendment to a towering work of modernism, Agee reorganizes the second volume of Musil's The Man Without Qualities, left unfinished at the time of Musil's death in 1942. The result, which incorporates the author's notes and never-before-published material, is this volume. Agee focuses on Agathe, the younger sister of the book's protagonist, the indolent mathematician Ulrich, as they embark on a quasi-incestuous relationship in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The manic Agathe's marriage to boorish professor Hagauer is on the rocks, and, following the death of her father, Agathe and Ulrich meet to settle his accounts and quickly embark on a series of "holy conversations," covering everything from morality to love. They begin to function as one, "symmetrical creatures of Nature's whim," even dressing similarly as "twins by choice." But Agathe becomes overwhelmed by her feelings for her brother and the machinations of the vengeful Hargauer, and considers suicide, only to be rescued by August Lindner, a schoolteacher of stringent principles, almost Ulrich's opposite in temperament, creating an unspoken love triangle. As a new approach to Musil's masterpiece, it shouldn't be read in place of the original text, but it does make for an interesting curio.
