Agathe: Or, the Forgotten Sister

By: Musil, Robert

From the author of 'A Man without Qualities, ' a novel about spirituality in the modern world.


Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the so-called "man without qualities" who is the major character in Robert Musil's great, unfinished novel of that name. Ulrich is intellectual and skeptical and rebellious and yet for all that rule-bound, held hostage by his attraction to the systematic, even if every existing system--political, ethical, metaphysical--strikes this onetime mathematician as fundamentally suspect. When, however, after many years Ulrich and his younger sister, Agathe, reunite over the bier of their dead father, a celebrated lawyer, both siblings are electrified. They are, for one thing, almost each other's spitting image, while Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more resistant to any kind of status quo than her brother. Engaging in a series of ever more intense and questioning "holy conversations," brother and sister progressively enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, and identity, seeking to arrive at a new conception of reality that they are sure lies within each other to discover.
Musil's Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister is one of the most unexpected and breathtaking adventures of twentieth-century fiction, while Joel Agee's new English translation captures all the nuance of Musil's famously acute and penetrating style.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1681373831
• ISBN13: 9781681373836
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Fascinatingly self- entwining

Robert Musil is the 20thC's most underrated modern novelist, and his "The Man without Qualities" is as unique and superb as Proust's "Remembrance" or Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" (I am not the only person who says this.) NYRB edition excerpts the best of its long and complicated 900 pages. This book challenges conventionality at every step, and is deep dive into the mind of one individual as well as the soul of Europe and modernism, not a fluffy waste of time you will easily forget. Its subtitle, "Into the Millenium, the Criminals" applies almost as well today as it did to Germany 1930-42. If you want to read a book that is a real window into human psychology, for both good and bad-- this is that book.