Robert Musil

No, the novel remained unfinished at the time of Musil's death in Geneva in 1942. He left behind thousands of pages of drafts and notes, and posthumous editions have been assembled from this material, though scholars still debate the intended ordering of later chapters.

Set in Vienna during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire leading up to 1914, it follows Ulrich, a mathematician who perceives the emptiness of his society's values. The novel satirizes the Kakanian bureaucracy and explores philosophical themes through the Parallel Campaign, a doomed effort to celebrate the emperor's jubilee.

The two main English translations are by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, published in the 1950s and 60s, and Sophie Wilkins's 1995 edition for Knopf, which is generally more readable. Burton Pike also translated selected later material published as 'Into the Millennium' for a clearer view of Musil's unfinished sections.

Musil is frequently grouped with Proust, Joyce, and Thomas Mann as a major European modernist, though he is less widely read in English. Like them he foregrounds interiority and essayistic digression, but his scientific training—he held an engineering doctorate—gives the prose a distinctly analytical, essayistic tone.