Trained as a mathematician, behavioral psychologist and engineer, Musil, who died in 1942, had worked as a journalist, librarian and civil servant before devoting his energies exclusively to literature. Musil's sense that with the destruction of his public he had ''outlived himself'' underlines the not quite facetious title, ''Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.'' His audience, never large, had been reduced to a small group, predominantly Jewish and even more endangered than he. By 1935 he was both impoverished and horrified by Austrian politics. So often ahead of his time, the archivist of social estrangement seems to have anticipated this exile. But it was first published a year later in Switzerland, the country he fled to in 1938 following the Anschluss. A congeries of light sketches, composed for Austrian and German newspapers between 19, it was compiled in 1935 when Musil was still living in Austria. SINCE so little of Robert Musil's work is available in English, this collection's appearance is a major literary event. POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A LIVING AUTHOR By Robert Musil.
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