Reading Without Apologies
Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister by Robert Musil, translated from the German by Joel Agee. NYRB Classics, 2019, $17.95 paper.
IT IS NOT uncommon to hear of readers skipping the battle scenes in War and Peace or skimming the dinner party descriptions in In Search of Lost Time. But as in the case of Proust—who ties the dinner party scenes together in a majestic bow in the final volume, Time Regained—what at first glance might seem too difficult or ancillary in a long novel can end up being a vital key to unlocking a deeper understanding of the work. When Prince Andrei, seriously wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz, lies on his back looking up at a vast blue sky and contemplates the nature of happiness—well, that’s a beautiful scene which readers of just the “peace” narrative will have regrettably missed.
Yet the omission of major characters and plotlines from the third part of Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s gargantuan , as presented in a new edition, may be fair game, since this multivolume novel—unlike Tolstoy’s and Proust’swas unfinished at couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’d planned to continue on with Musil’s magnum opus, but I wasn’t sure when I’d get around to the intimidating second volume, which is even longer than the first (thanks to the inclusion of more than six hundred pages of posthumous material such as potential chapters, drafts, and sketches). , I thought, would provide a fresh translation while leaving out the posthumous sections, making it an average-sized novel in the attractively bound NYRB Classics format, easy to carry on one’s commute.
