Posthumous Papers of a Living Author     by Robert Musil, Translated by P Wortsman Original title: Nachlass zu Lebzeiten Original language: German Published by Eridanos Pr Pub. Date: December 1988 Format: Hardcover, 145 pages ISBN: 0941419002 List Price: $21.00, £13.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £13.95 Published by Viking Penguin Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback, 160 pages ISBN: 0140189157 Edition: REPRINT List Price: $11.95, £6.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.99 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1995 Format: Paperback, 145 pages List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

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Musil is especially celebrated for his long major work The Man without Qualities, reviewed above. This book is rather the opposite, being made up of short pieces collected by the author — despite its title he was actually still alive but getting a jump on any future editors — basically early pieces and pieces written while he was occupied with his masterwork.

These are ‘pieces’ rather than short stories; extended thoughts, reflections on objects, little situations (like the ghastly experience of flies on flypaper!) and a good deal else. The writing is, to say the least, extremely accomplished while Musil’s speciality here is to view familiar things from a radically original perspective. Perhaps the most startling and delicious examples are Sheep as seen in Another Light (‘they had the long faces and the delicate skulls of martyrs. Their black stockings and hoods against the white fur reminded of morbid monks and fanatics’) and Maidens and Heroes (which is an extraordinary piece about dogs). Throughout the book, one encounters the pleasure of perfect ‘poetically correct’ prose; ‘How lovely are you servant girls with your peasant legs’, where one single sentence contains a whole rushing world.

Another marvellous piece is Boardinghouse Nevermore which is a kind of Teutonic mini-Room with a View (E.M.Forster) about the inhabitants (and proprietress) of a splendid German Pension in Rome in which ‘everything was so impeccable there you wanted to cry’. It has less romance than Room with a View but even wackier boardinghouse characters; the Swiss Pastor staying in Rome ‘to represent the interests of a Protestant sect not much larger than himself’ and the Englishwoman of a certain age, Miss Frazier, who sits bolt upright in the lounge, doing her crochet, her ‘daily lesson’ and then ‘with quick fingers played two rounds of solitaire’ before going to bed and is always ultra-careful not to exchange a single word with her fellow-guests...

Also to especially note is Slovenian Village Funeral a lovely, dignified word-picture... part of a book made up of marvellous writing exercises and pocket masterpieces, unique and unmissable, particularly the early and middle sections...

‘Somewhere to the rear of the Pincio, or already in Villa Borghese, two sarcophagus covers of a common sort of stone lie out in the open between the bushes. They constitute no rare treasure, they’re just lying around. Stretched out on top of them, the couple who once as a final memento had themselves copied in stone, are at rest... as though on a picnic, the figures stretched themselves out, and seem to have awakened from a little sleep that lasted two thousand years.

They’ve propped themselves up on their elbows and are eyeing each other. All that’s missing between them is the basket of cheese, fruit and wine.

The woman wears a hairdo of little curls — any minute now she’ll arrange them according to the latest fashion from the time before she fell asleep. And they’re smiling at each other; a long, a very long smile. You look away: And they still they go on smiling.

This faithful, proper, middle class, beloved look has lasted centuries; it was sent forth in ancient Rome and crosses your glance today.

Don’t be surprised that even in front of you it endures, that they don’t look away or lower their eyes: this doesn’t make them stone-like, but rather all the more human’. p23-24