main character, Ulrich) was to arrive at a synthesis between strict scientific fact and the mystical, which he refers to as "the hovering life." Musil originally opposed publishing only sections of his still unfinished work and later regretted submitting to his publisher's insistence, because what was already printed could not be subjected to further amendments. Some chapters were redacted by Musil from the printers after he had already sent them for publication. Critics speculate on the viability of Musil's original conception. Some estimate the intended length of the work to be twice as long as the text that survives. Legacy In 1996 Knopf published a new English translation of Man Without Qualities by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. The translation received a special citation for the PEN Translation Prize. Writing about the Wilkins-Pike translation in The New York Times, Michael Hofmann wrote "Of all the great European novelists of the first third of the century – Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – Robert Musil is far and away the least read; and yet he's as shapely as Gibbon, as mordant as Voltaire, as witty as Oscar Wilde and as indecent as Arthur Schnitzler." Writing about Musil in The New Criterion, Roger Kimball wrote, "Whatever else one can say about it, The Man Without Qualities stands as one of the great modern works of satire." Robert McCrum ranked it one of the top 10 books of the 20th century: "This is a meditation on the plight of the little man lost in a great machine. One of Europe's unquestioned 20th-century masterpieces." See also Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century Value theory References Sources External links 1930 German-language novels 1943 German-language novels Novels by Robert Musil Austrian historical novels Unfinished novels Austrian philosophical novels Modernist novels Novels set in Vienna Exilliteratur Contemporary philosophical literature Rowohlt Verlag books Third-person narrative novels 1930 Austrian novels