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Agathe: Or, The Forgotten Sister
From the author of 'A Man without Qualities,' a novel about spirituality in the modern world.
Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich. Beginning with a series of increasingly intense “holy conversations,” the two gradually enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, identity, and understanding in pursuit of a new, true form of being that they are seeking to discover.
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is perhaps the most profoundly exploratory and unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister reveals with new clarity a particular dimension of this multidimensional book—the dimension that meant the most to Musil himself and that inspired some of his most searching writing. The outstanding translator Joel Agee captures the acuity, audacity, and unsettling poetry of a book that is meant to be nothing short of life-changing.
Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich. Beginning with a series of increasingly intense “holy conversations,” the two gradually enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, identity, and understanding in pursuit of a new, true form of being that they are seeking to discover.
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is perhaps the most profoundly exploratory and unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister reveals with new clarity a particular dimension of this multidimensional book—the dimension that meant the most to Musil himself and that inspired some of his most searching writing. The outstanding translator Joel Agee captures the acuity, audacity, and unsettling poetry of a book that is meant to be nothing short of life-changing.
464 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2019
23 people are currently reading
470 people want to read
About the author
Robert Musil
308 books1,377 followersAustrian writer.
He graduated military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892-1894) and then Hranice, in that time also known as Mährisch Weißkirchen, (1894-1897). These school experiences are reflected in his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless.
He served in the army during The First World War. When Austria became a part of the Third Reich in 1938, Musil left for exile in Switzerland, where he died of a stroke on April 15, 1942. Musil collapsed in the middle of his gymnastic exercises and is rumoured to have died with an expression of ironic amusement on his face. He was 61 years old.
He graduated military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892-1894) and then Hranice, in that time also known as Mährisch Weißkirchen, (1894-1897). These school experiences are reflected in his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless.
He served in the army during The First World War. When Austria became a part of the Third Reich in 1938, Musil left for exile in Switzerland, where he died of a stroke on April 15, 1942. Musil collapsed in the middle of his gymnastic exercises and is rumoured to have died with an expression of ironic amusement on his face. He was 61 years old.
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March 29, 2021
Agathe or The Forgotten Sister
-by Robert Musil
“Agathe” is a collection of chapters from Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” whose first volume he published in 1930, and which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1942. This collection can, however, be read on its own, with some footnotes to clarify references to the larger work, and an understanding that the major themes developed before these excerpts begin. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Ulrich and Agathe, a brother and sister who have isolated themselves in their dead father’s house, where they discuss these themes, which themselves revolve around principles of morality and authenticity.
I was personally attracted to a minor character - Gottfried Hagauer, the hapless husband of Agathe, whom she has decided to divorce. He is, at heart, a good man, but is presented through Agathe’s eyes as too conforming to social conventions. Yet Hagauer’s character lies at the crux of one of the major themes: If his life is inauthentic, according to Agathe, because he is too bound by social convention, what, then, does it mean to live an authentic life? (Cue the references to Sartre, Heidgger, et al.) And to what extent can Agathe and Ulrich, siblings with few other social contacts, violate those conventions and still be considered moral? In a world where social norms lead to inauthenticity, what sort of behavior is allowable? Is reality simply one of several possibilities, for which another possibility can be substituted?
The potential for an incestuous relationship between the two siblings here is both real and metaphorical. “...it could no more be said that she rejected the thought of entering into illicit relations with her brother than that it was something she wished for.” (153) They become each other’s yin and yang, but also appear before each other in Pierrot costumes, representing “this desire for a double of the opposite sex” (189) to accommodate the “bisexuality of the soul.” In chapter 17, Musil calls them “Siamese Twins.” The erotic and the philosophical are not strangers here, but intimately bound.
The story does not devolve into a sort of melancholy saudade or hiraeth for an unattainable love that would violate the most basic of human norms. Agathe and Ulrich are repeatedly stopped by a sense of moral limits: “This calls for prudence.” ‘Romance’ “...is a surfeit of emotion, and moonlight raptures have been debased to orgies of sentimentality.” (299) Their relationship becomes instead the impetus for deeply philosophical discussions. When Agathe asks Ulrich, “...Koniatkowski’s critique of Kneppler’s deduction from Danielli’s Theorem is interesting, don’t you agree?”(156), the point is not to know who any of these thinkers is, but to become involved in the discussion of mathematics, literature, art and morality that follows. The reading becomes a contemplative activity, not the anticipation of the next turn of the plot.
Musil tethers Agatha and Ulrich to the world outside their father’s house by bringing Gottfried Hagauer back into the narrative and by introducing another man into Agatha’s life, the widower Lindner. Hagauer writes Agathe a letter in which he tries to explain, to himself primarily, how he sees her behavior, having been seeking “a way out of this tension between conscience and chivalry.” (214) He describes her behavior as part of “a widespread pattern of female underperformance, [which he classifies] as social imbecility.” She has proven herself unable to deal with the problems that “our modern age” poses for women and can only solve those problems by seeking help and returning to him and to a life of social convention. Lindner is then presented as a potential romantic interest. They discuss the nature of love, but there is no possibility of love between them because Lindner is a man of Duty, with a capital D. He, and by extension, she is bound by Duty to God’s law, especially concerning her marriage. What she considers to be her heroic defiance of social convention, he challenges with “a higher heroism, that of heroic submission!” (288), which, he claims, “you obviously wanted to hear, otherwise you would not have come to me!” Incapable of either returning to a conventional marriage or of submitting to the demands of Duty, Agathe returns to Ulrich, who obligingly turns out the light as they stand together in the moonlight.
“Desire, not finding an outlet, sank back into the body and filled it with a tenderness as indefinable as a last day of autumn or a first day of spring.” (312) Ulrich and Agathe withdraw further into their isolation from the world and further into their conversations about polar opposites of passion and asceticism, the sublime and the trivial, honor and indignity, moving between elation, amusement and moroseness. As interesting as their conversations are, their life together becomes, essentially, “a happening without anything happening.” (354) They are in truth “twins'' in the way they both reflect and embody each other, so that, as Ulrich finally realizes, “the two kinds of human being that were at issue could not signify anything other than a man "'without qualities' in contrast to the one with all the qualities a man is capable of showing,” a nihilist as opposed to an activist. (356)
Musil’s “plot” reaches a point beyond which there is nowhere to go and no further resolution to be reached. It is no wonder he could not finish the larger work of which this is a part. Where Joyce’s “Ulysses” is an exercise in style as it follows Leopold Bloom through his day, ending with Molly’s ecstatic affirmation of “Yes...and yes I said yes I will Yes,” Musil ends with questions hanging, much as Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” ends in mid-sentence with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s “A way a lone a last a loved a long the…”, or Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” ends with Estragon telling Vladimir, “I can’t go on like this,” and yet, as the curtain falls, they do, just as Agathe and Ulrich do, just as we all do.
-by Robert Musil
“Agathe” is a collection of chapters from Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” whose first volume he published in 1930, and which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1942. This collection can, however, be read on its own, with some footnotes to clarify references to the larger work, and an understanding that the major themes developed before these excerpts begin. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Ulrich and Agathe, a brother and sister who have isolated themselves in their dead father’s house, where they discuss these themes, which themselves revolve around principles of morality and authenticity.
I was personally attracted to a minor character - Gottfried Hagauer, the hapless husband of Agathe, whom she has decided to divorce. He is, at heart, a good man, but is presented through Agathe’s eyes as too conforming to social conventions. Yet Hagauer’s character lies at the crux of one of the major themes: If his life is inauthentic, according to Agathe, because he is too bound by social convention, what, then, does it mean to live an authentic life? (Cue the references to Sartre, Heidgger, et al.) And to what extent can Agathe and Ulrich, siblings with few other social contacts, violate those conventions and still be considered moral? In a world where social norms lead to inauthenticity, what sort of behavior is allowable? Is reality simply one of several possibilities, for which another possibility can be substituted?
The potential for an incestuous relationship between the two siblings here is both real and metaphorical. “...it could no more be said that she rejected the thought of entering into illicit relations with her brother than that it was something she wished for.” (153) They become each other’s yin and yang, but also appear before each other in Pierrot costumes, representing “this desire for a double of the opposite sex” (189) to accommodate the “bisexuality of the soul.” In chapter 17, Musil calls them “Siamese Twins.” The erotic and the philosophical are not strangers here, but intimately bound.
The story does not devolve into a sort of melancholy saudade or hiraeth for an unattainable love that would violate the most basic of human norms. Agathe and Ulrich are repeatedly stopped by a sense of moral limits: “This calls for prudence.” ‘Romance’ “...is a surfeit of emotion, and moonlight raptures have been debased to orgies of sentimentality.” (299) Their relationship becomes instead the impetus for deeply philosophical discussions. When Agathe asks Ulrich, “...Koniatkowski’s critique of Kneppler’s deduction from Danielli’s Theorem is interesting, don’t you agree?”(156), the point is not to know who any of these thinkers is, but to become involved in the discussion of mathematics, literature, art and morality that follows. The reading becomes a contemplative activity, not the anticipation of the next turn of the plot.
Musil tethers Agatha and Ulrich to the world outside their father’s house by bringing Gottfried Hagauer back into the narrative and by introducing another man into Agatha’s life, the widower Lindner. Hagauer writes Agathe a letter in which he tries to explain, to himself primarily, how he sees her behavior, having been seeking “a way out of this tension between conscience and chivalry.” (214) He describes her behavior as part of “a widespread pattern of female underperformance, [which he classifies] as social imbecility.” She has proven herself unable to deal with the problems that “our modern age” poses for women and can only solve those problems by seeking help and returning to him and to a life of social convention. Lindner is then presented as a potential romantic interest. They discuss the nature of love, but there is no possibility of love between them because Lindner is a man of Duty, with a capital D. He, and by extension, she is bound by Duty to God’s law, especially concerning her marriage. What she considers to be her heroic defiance of social convention, he challenges with “a higher heroism, that of heroic submission!” (288), which, he claims, “you obviously wanted to hear, otherwise you would not have come to me!” Incapable of either returning to a conventional marriage or of submitting to the demands of Duty, Agathe returns to Ulrich, who obligingly turns out the light as they stand together in the moonlight.
“Desire, not finding an outlet, sank back into the body and filled it with a tenderness as indefinable as a last day of autumn or a first day of spring.” (312) Ulrich and Agathe withdraw further into their isolation from the world and further into their conversations about polar opposites of passion and asceticism, the sublime and the trivial, honor and indignity, moving between elation, amusement and moroseness. As interesting as their conversations are, their life together becomes, essentially, “a happening without anything happening.” (354) They are in truth “twins'' in the way they both reflect and embody each other, so that, as Ulrich finally realizes, “the two kinds of human being that were at issue could not signify anything other than a man "'without qualities' in contrast to the one with all the qualities a man is capable of showing,” a nihilist as opposed to an activist. (356)
Musil’s “plot” reaches a point beyond which there is nowhere to go and no further resolution to be reached. It is no wonder he could not finish the larger work of which this is a part. Where Joyce’s “Ulysses” is an exercise in style as it follows Leopold Bloom through his day, ending with Molly’s ecstatic affirmation of “Yes...and yes I said yes I will Yes,” Musil ends with questions hanging, much as Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” ends in mid-sentence with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s “A way a lone a last a loved a long the…”, or Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” ends with Estragon telling Vladimir, “I can’t go on like this,” and yet, as the curtain falls, they do, just as Agathe and Ulrich do, just as we all do.
Read
June 22, 2020Oh time, thou must untangle this, not I.
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie!
Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 2
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie!
Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 2
ongoing
August 25, 2021I just don't have enough mental bandwidth for Musil right now. That, or it's too darn hot. I'll get back to this come autumn.
May 10, 2021
This has the feeling of Musil's short fiction, where you just want someone to open a window to change the air. By harvesting this one substrain of the original novel, it's robbed of any change of action or attention that relieves and refreshes the reader. The only other characters that come into it are the worst characters of the novel. And the seculsion of these siblings talking about love, removed from the broader political context in which it's happening somehow seems like an ironic undermining of Musil's own intentions for this masterwork, showing up how he was writing something that was turning more and more away from the world as the shadows of Nazism were closing in. Reading the original nearly 15 years ago was life-changing. This had a feeling of irrelevance.
While it was amazing to revisit, in the beginning, these two and their freewheeling conversations on the hermaphroditic nature of our thoughts and feelings, the way in which a thinking person is dissatisfied with how thought and feeling are left over to their own sides and not resolved in some dialectical union, it gets tedious. Condensed to just these portions of the original novel, you see the formula for the conversations, the dumb interruptions and expressions from one or the other interlocutor that are always the same (the constant dissatisfaction and laughter after saying something, the pulling back from going too far). It gets so that the same way that Ulrich is always talking at Agathe starts to make you think more about how he's mansplaining mysticism rather than thinking about mysticism (probably also the difference caused by years in the two people, both me, who had read this and the original novel).
Also, the two new chapters (to readers in English) were probably best left on the cutting room floor. They don't have the lucidity, the mounting rush of perfectly paced and placed sentences that the other chapters have. It was either the muddy sense they left or my desire to just have done with the book that left me feeling these additions detracted from the salubrious quality of the preceding chapters.
More importantly, for anyone thinking of reading this: this is not for someone who hasn't read The Man Without Qualities. It is solely for specialists. It's not a good way into his writing or a casual first approach to the novel. A first-timer would be turned off from approaching one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Don't start here. (3.5 stars?)
While it was amazing to revisit, in the beginning, these two and their freewheeling conversations on the hermaphroditic nature of our thoughts and feelings, the way in which a thinking person is dissatisfied with how thought and feeling are left over to their own sides and not resolved in some dialectical union, it gets tedious. Condensed to just these portions of the original novel, you see the formula for the conversations, the dumb interruptions and expressions from one or the other interlocutor that are always the same (the constant dissatisfaction and laughter after saying something, the pulling back from going too far). It gets so that the same way that Ulrich is always talking at Agathe starts to make you think more about how he's mansplaining mysticism rather than thinking about mysticism (probably also the difference caused by years in the two people, both me, who had read this and the original novel).
Also, the two new chapters (to readers in English) were probably best left on the cutting room floor. They don't have the lucidity, the mounting rush of perfectly paced and placed sentences that the other chapters have. It was either the muddy sense they left or my desire to just have done with the book that left me feeling these additions detracted from the salubrious quality of the preceding chapters.
More importantly, for anyone thinking of reading this: this is not for someone who hasn't read The Man Without Qualities. It is solely for specialists. It's not a good way into his writing or a casual first approach to the novel. A first-timer would be turned off from approaching one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Don't start here. (3.5 stars?)
November 9, 2024
An incredible achievement. Musil’s writing probes the boundary between intellectualism, embodied experience (which we could call a kind of phenomenology), and mystical experience with incredible precision and perceptiveness.
Musil also stands as the only other writer that I’ve found as exhilarating as Dostoyevsky - which I no mean feat. I love this book, and will certainly be reading more Musil after this.
Musil also stands as the only other writer that I’ve found as exhilarating as Dostoyevsky - which I no mean feat. I love this book, and will certainly be reading more Musil after this.
November 3, 2020
I honestly didn't expect this to work as well as it did. The sibling relationship, presented in this redacted form, has a clarity and impact I don't remember from TMw/oQ.
February 13, 2024
Excerpted from the second volume and posthumous papers of Musil's 'Man Without Qualities,' focusing on Ulrich's relationship to his (newly rediscovered) sister at the expense of the rotating cast of characters making up the first volume. While reading, I got my copy of the extended Norton volume of these in the mail, and I have to say I missed the interjections by those friends and foes. They're just too funny. (Agathe & Ulrich's long conversations are often interesting, often beautiful, even stunning, but usually not very funny.) Some of those cut chapters were really brilliant, too.
For that reason, I'm not sure I agree with the idea behind the project of this edition; I think a reader interested in getting started with Musil is better off with one of the Archipelago editions, or maybe even just diving into that first big volume. The humor there really goes a long way. But, can't give this one less than five stars—it's still pretty mind-bending stuff, if a little dry. Some individual chapters I would come away from shaken. Agee's translation is pretty beautiful, too, and he mostly manages to avoid the occasional awkwardness running through Wilkins'.
For that reason, I'm not sure I agree with the idea behind the project of this edition; I think a reader interested in getting started with Musil is better off with one of the Archipelago editions, or maybe even just diving into that first big volume. The humor there really goes a long way. But, can't give this one less than five stars—it's still pretty mind-bending stuff, if a little dry. Some individual chapters I would come away from shaken. Agee's translation is pretty beautiful, too, and he mostly manages to avoid the occasional awkwardness running through Wilkins'.
April 7, 2021
This is one of those books where, if you like this kind of book, you'll like this book. What? Okay, "Agatha, or The Forgotten Sister" is actually a lengthy selection from Robert Musil's two volume "The Man Without Qualities". (A fact that wasn't clearly stated in the book's blurb.) However, the selection does stand well on its own.
The selection is a detailed and eloquent presentation of an ongoing dialog between an adult brother and sister on life, love, and morality. The discussion is wide-ranging, personal, often philosophical, and, at times, quasimystical. The siblings also reveal a tenuous sexual dimension in their interactions.
Not an easy read. However, if you appreciate a thought provoking and literate examination of these issues, the book is both unique and powerful.
The selection is a detailed and eloquent presentation of an ongoing dialog between an adult brother and sister on life, love, and morality. The discussion is wide-ranging, personal, often philosophical, and, at times, quasimystical. The siblings also reveal a tenuous sexual dimension in their interactions.
Not an easy read. However, if you appreciate a thought provoking and literate examination of these issues, the book is both unique and powerful.
November 29, 2022
Interesting book. It was full of philosophical musings which I enjoyed. But I wasn’t able to exactly follow a given plot for it to be a novel. It drifted in & out of several plots, none of which exactly seemed to have the traditional beginning, middle, and end. I was told this novel rivaled Proust’s Recherche. I don’t think it had nearly the literary elegance Proust achieved.
October 28, 2021
I confess, I've always liked the idea of Musil more than actually reading him. This, however, was really well done and relatively enjoyable to read. Perhaps Joel Agee could translate the rest of it now?
February 27, 2021
Not for me - I can't say I enjoyed it and not helped by the fact that the two protagonists, Ulrich and Agathe are thoroughly unlikeable.
October 6, 2021
Agathe is a part of Musil's great novel A Man without Qualities. Seems to be an excellent translation.
I say, "make it a part of your literary life!"
I say, "make it a part of your literary life!"
February 12, 2023
The story of Ulrich and Agathe told in order separted from other elements of MwQ, as in vol.2 of the Wilkes/Pike translation. Mr. Agee while doing his superlative translation obviously pays homage to past translations.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews