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Robert Musil

"Robert Musil's works fascinate me until this day ... and what I learned from him was the hardest thing: that one can undertake a work that will take decades, without knowing if one can ever finish it, an undertaking that consists mainly of patience, that assumes an almost unhuman stubbornness ..." (Elias Canetti)

Dutch-Morrocan author Abdelkader Benali writes about contemporary intellectual life in Lebanon, and the remarkable omnipresence of Austrian author Robert Musil. "Part of the attraction Musil's book 'The Man without Qualities' exerts on Lebanese intellectuals comes from it's large span, and how it ingeniously reflects the hopeless situation in which the political elite found itself (on the eve of World War I – ed): a giant with feet of clay, who has lost all bearing. When I talked with him about literature, the director Nazeem brought up Musil: 'He's what gives me a foothold at the moment. Of course I read him quite a while ago, but he put in words what I've always felt here: the feeling of sitting through a very painful theatrical performance'."

Herman Broch

André Gide, John Dos Passos, Alfred Dablin, James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Marcel Proust

Bibliography

  • Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment and Other Mimetic Structures, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1997
  • Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, The Noonday Press, New York 1998
  • Max Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, in Gesammelte Werken, Bern, Franke, 1955, vol. III
  • Richard H Weisberg, The Failure of the Word, New Haven-London, Yale University press, 1984
  • Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Vintage, New York 1992. (back)

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