For the first time in English-fresh insights into the mind of one of our century's great novelists. Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and James Joyce for his monumental, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities . His Diaries , a distillation of forty-three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that details the moods of artistic adventure. Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence. "[The] American publication [of Diaries ] is an important cultural event for which everyone involved with the project deserves our gratitude." -Los Angeles Times "It is as if a private library has been now opened to public use and benefit." -Washington Times