The unreliable narrator

There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another.

There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another. Vastly ambitious, densely intelligent, profoundly inquisitive, these works demand from the reader constant attention and unlimited patience to make out the images reflected in what Broch called the ‘dark mirror’ of fiction. Unlike Proust’s monumental Recherche, into which the reader can wander and stay to converse with a particular character or linger in one of its many rooms, Musil and Broch’s constructions are not meant for comparative reminiscences. Neither is Javier Marías’ magnum opus, the trilogy entitled Your Face Tomorrow, whose third and final volume, Poison, Shadow and Farewell, has at last appeared in English, in an impeccable translation by Margaret Jull Costa.