Robert Musil was born in Klagenfurt, in southern Austria, in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents sent him to military boarding schools, which he hated, and those years became his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), about the cruelty boys inflict on one another at a remote academy. It was a success, and it is still read as a dark forecast of the century to come.

Musil was not a typical novelist. He trained as an engineer, then earned a doctorate in philosophy and psychology in Berlin, writing his thesis on the physicist Ernst Mach. He was offered an academic career and turned it down to write. In the First World War he served as an officer on the Italian front.

From the 1920s on he devoted himself to one book. The Man Without Qualities is set in Vienna in 1913, on the eve of the war that would destroy the empire. Its hero, Ulrich, is a gifted mathematician of thirty-two who has decided to take a year off from life to work out what he should do with it. He finds himself appointed secretary to the “Parallel Campaign,” a committee of grandees planning a vast celebration of the Austrian emperor’s seventy years on the throne, due in 1918. Nobody can agree on what the celebration should actually celebrate. The reader knows, as the characters do not, that 1918 will bring the end of the empire instead.

The novel is funny, essayistic and enormous. Musil invented a name for the old empire, “Kakania,” from the initials “k.k.” stamped on everything official, which also suggests something less polite. The first volume appeared in 1930, part of the second in 1933. Then the Nazis came to power. Musil’s books were banned in Germany, and in 1938, after Austria was annexed, he and his Jewish wife, Martha, fled to Switzerland.

He lived his last years in Geneva, poor and almost forgotten, working on the novel every day. He died of a stroke in April 1942, at sixty-one, still revising it. Martha published what she could of the rest. After the war, readers rediscovered the book, and it is now counted among the great novels of the twentieth century, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable.