About the book
Austrian writer Robert Musil worked on this modernist novel for more than twenty years and left it unfinished at his death, in three volumes and assorted drafts. Set in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, it follows Ulrich, a mathematician searching for a sense of life and reality who feels strangely indifferent to all his own qualities. Ulrich joins the Parallel Campaign, a committee preparing to celebrate 70 years of Emperor Franz Joseph I's reign, in which his cousin Diotima plays an eager part. Described as a story of ideas, the work runs well over a thousand pages and digresses into questions of truth and opinion and the way a society arranges its ideas.
ReD Associates founder Christian Madsbjerg said its biggest lesson for him was why human lives can be only partly understood through natural science, and why poetry and music reveal more about our world than counting people.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Christian Madsbjerg (Founder/ReD Associates)
Musil’s book is about many different things. The difference between Germany and Austria, Idealism and pragmatism, for example. But for me there was one huge takeaway: It explains why the lives of humans can only be partially studied in natural science. Counting people and their response to questions is less efficient than reading our poetry and listening to music if you want to understand the world we live in. When he writes “It was a fine spring day in Vienna,” we understand exactly and in great detail what that feels like. You can measure temperature, pressure and wind as much as you like, but sometimes science only muddies our understanding of each other.
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