![]() ![]() She speaks both to the complexity of translating Musil and to the psychology of his prose, particularly in the feullitons, short pieces which make up a significant number of the pieces in this collection. The handsome edition of Contra Mundum Press has a long, thoughtful introduction by Genese Grill. ![]() ![]() If I begin with my own experience of Musil’s hypnotism, it is to explain why Thought Flights, the most recent publication of Musil’s work is such a valuable addition to his published work. And yet, Musil remains for all his frankness, elusive, perhaps because he often found his own existence and mind so. ![]() There are other great novelists at the end of whose books or stories I have found myself changed, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, come to mind, but I confess that none have exercised the continual hold on me that Musil does. The writer may be dead, but the words still hold life and in the case of Robert Musil, whom I know only in translation, it is the electric current of thought that seems to pass from his pages to me-teasing, taunting at times asking me to accompany him into a zone of danger. Literature in this sense is not an entertainment, but an initiation. Here are writers who draw readers into their magnetic fields so that everything they write is of interest-because the author’s dreams, thoughts, questions, do not simply mirror the reader’s but take him or her through the looking glass into a secret world. ![]()
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