I read The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

I LOVED this but it's so hard to know what to talk about. It's 1130 pages long and basically does not have a plot beyond following how the various people surrounding the establishment of a group to plan some great celebration of Austrian culture in 1914 (uh oh!) basically waste their time and defer making any sort of decision. Which sounds awful, and as a pure satire it would be tedious. Discussing it with Stephen, he was like, well the difference between like flat satire and what's going on here is that flat satire is just like, ha ha, this guy is dumb! (and not me) whereas this novel more directly confronts the horror that, contextually, anyone can be truly clueless. Alongside the march to disaster, which you care about because these characters, up to the most craven and irritating, are depicted so dimensionally and humanely, there's bizarre moments of joy and pleasure, and agonizing moments of insight only just missed. So it's a political "types of guy" novel in a similar sense to The Magic Mountain, but also to a surprising extent a lot about gender and desire and granular day to day experience... a bit of grist for trans readings and anti-family readings as well. It's one of those novels that can only be summed up in the experience of reading it! Try it!!! You might like it!!