Grill's meticulously researched study offers a persuasive and original interpretation of [Musil's] novel. . . . [T]his book is highly recommended for a deeper understanding of Musil's brilliant and still relevant modernist work.
JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES
Grill's book is a careful meditation on the poetics of metaphor that she finds organizing Musil's novel. Grill has mined the ... Read moreNachlaß to good effect, making available important material and new considerations of the novel.
GERMAN QUARTERLY
[A] worthy contribution to international Musil research. Grill obtains with it the rare status of a researcher who at one and the same time explains a thesis and carries it out in her own writing. For her painstaking work in the archive the study earns the particular praise and interest of those who want to concern themselves more deeply with the canonical works of modernism such as The Man without Qualities.
MUSIL-FORUM
[P]rovides an invaluable structure - the best I've encountered - for assessing the later sections and unfinished draft material of The Man Without Qualities. . . . Grill's major achievement is in bringing together the disparate, unpublished material of Musil's last years into a structure that clarifies, at least somewhat, Musil's ambitions. . . . For illuminating the join between the earlier and latter sections of [Musil's novel] in a way that gives real shape to the whole, Grill's book is tremendous.
DAVID AUERBACH, WAGGISH.ORG
[I]nspired and textually knowledgeable . . . . [A] spirited and enthusiastic defence of the creative literary act as a kind of utopian 'révolution permanente' . . . forever avoiding closure . . . . The reader is led through a rich textual landscape, from quotation to quotation (including material from the Klagenfurt electronic edition . . .), but the overall impression thus generated is of a self-referential and secular artistic universe that is loaded with theological expectations - something that would surely have made Musil smile.
MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW
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