Call it a modern woman’s weltschmerz but I was wary of this volume of short stories, titled as it is Five Women, written by a man in the early 20th c. (Somewhat confusingly this collection presents Musil’s work out of order--Three Women [pub. 1924] came out long after The Perfecting of a Love and The Temptation of Quiet Veronica [pub 1911] ). I was prepared for schlock, for Flaubertian flights of fancy; I prepared to encounter, in other words under-drawn, trivial and disappointing women.

I had the wrong idea. Musil eschews frivolity altogether. He is impressively disturbing. His stories depict the cloven psyches of utterly serious women and men alike--drawing attention to the basic fact of human opacity: even those closest to us remain unknown and unconquerable entities, as indeed we are also so often unknown to ourselves. Musil provides a lens into the interior world of his characters, revealing them to be generally decent, and yet also profoundly schizotypal: their thoughts cannot stay fixed. Yoked as they are to the vicissitudes of life and relationships, they vacillate, hovering always on the painful (and occasionally erotic) edge of indecision. In Musil’s paranoic universe everyone seems to be trapped in their own heads, increasingly disconnected from “reality.” Interestingly, it is easy to see how Musil may well be the great-grandfather of what Antoine Volodine calls Post-Exoticism.

There is quiet but resistant strength in Musil’s various service women, all of whom seem to elude the prying eyes of the men who stand in authority over them. The women, knowing the score, hold themselves forever in reserve. Musil is smart to see that for a disenfranchised women this is a strategy of self-preservation, and is as much an expression of their vulnerability as it is of their power. The men in authority invariably become obsessed with the fragile simplicity of the peasant women, and long to contain them--an impossible task given the imbalance of power. Even when the women submit they do not, and this is what makes his work stand out as surprisingly insightful and proto-feminist. ( )

This is a collection of stories that reminded me of Joyce's great collection, Dubliners. Musil's stories are grouped into two sections, "Three Women" and "Unions". All of the stories are linked by their erotic themes, the nature of love and its relation to knowledge. This is a foreshadowing of one of the themes of his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities. In this collection the story "Quiet Veronica' explores bestial love, while in "The Perfecting of Love" it is profligate. "Grigia" and "Tonka" present variations on the seduction of a peasant girl, by a man of a higher social class and by a student, respectively. Musil uses these situations to explore deeper in the human consciousness with sex as the central ground of his exploration.
I was impressed with the authenticity of of the settings and the integration of peasant life with the themes of love and death.
"Love ran ahead like a herald, love was made ready everywhere like a bed freshly made up for the guest, and each living being more gifts of welcome in their eyes. The women could let that be freely seen, but sometimes as one passed a meadow there might be an old peasant there, waving his scythe like Death in person." (p 19)
The women in the stories experience love and guilt and the energetic ecstasy of turning points that shake their world. Musil draws fine distinctions like a scientist with a scalpel. The reactions of their lovers, the men with whom they interact are always finely drawn and sometimes deeply incisive.
"Volition, cognition, and perception were like a tangled skein. One noticed this only when one tried to find the end of the thread. But perhaps there was some other way of going through the world, other than following the thread of truth? At such moments, when a veneer of coldness separated him from everything, Tonka was more than a fairy-tale: she was almost a visitation.' (p 110)
All of the stories have obvious autobiographical elements, ties to the personal life of the author, but what stands out is his creative ability to both imagine these characters' lives and bring his intelligence to bear on their situation. The result provides the reader with a wealth of issues to digest, presented in a prose setting that brings the world of turn-of-the -century Austria alive. This is also an excellent introduction to the writing of one of the twentieth century's premiere novelist of ideas. ( )