![]() Since last year’s presidential election, Kushner has achieved a remarkable feat: He is both everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent and wholly absent. And like the United States today, Kakania is a world, Musil writes, where “persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous.” A place where once-sharp boundaries have blurred, and where once-meaningful values have vanished, Kakania steeps in narcissism and greed. Like the United States today, Kakania is being pulled in opposing directions by the forces of authoritarianism and liberalism. ![]() It is set in the fictional country of Kakania - a scarcely fictionalized Austro-Hungarian Empire. But recent events in the United States have made this timeless classic once again timely. The Austrian writer had taken refuge there in 1938 with his Jewish wife Martha, and as the war progressed, he spent his time trying to make ends meet and to complete his novel, “The Man Without Qualities.” Neither effort was successful: Musil’s life ended in poverty when a stroke felled him in 1942, while his novel, clocking in at 1,000 pages, was still unfinished.ĭespite, or perhaps partly because of its lack of ending, “The Man Without Qualities” has become a modernist classic. ![]() Seventy-five years ago, Robert Musil died in Switzerland. ![]()
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