“Was he a strong person? He didn’t know.”
This novel is ostensibly 1750 pages long, at least if you go by the basic page count. But don’t worry! It’s actually only 1200 pages, plus another 500 pages of partial and abandoned material, so it’s not that bad! The novel is great, but exhausting as you can imagine. The biggest exhausting element about it is that it’s not remotely cohesive or consistent. There’s numerous narrative threads and there’s sections of cohesion, but for the most part it follows a group of characters (primarily our title character Ulrich, a PhD math student who goes onto many “adventures” in the novel and his social circle and, later, family and then also Moosbrugger, a convicted rapist and murderer, who mostly sits in a prison cell. Is this an uncomfortable comparison? No, it’s not uncomfortable at all.
The novel circulates around the end of the Austrian-Hungarian empire and acts in a lot of way similar to Proust’s accounting of the nobility before WWI. It’s a mass and sprawling novel that sits in small rooms and ponders on things for the most part, often doing little. But it’s also one that thinks about what it means to be a human in 20th century, and wonders if the modernity of technology, warfare, literature, empire, art, and psychology have done anything to improve anybody’s lot. It’s not Marxist, but it reaches some conclusions that for the most part life is pretty much the way it’s always been, just with more things to keep track, and no more satisfaction for doing so.
“His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn’t look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he’s like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman’s eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect—why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities—yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don’t belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He’ll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context—nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only ‘how’ it is—some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that’s what interests him.”