My first Musil, though I think many ease into him this way. How else could I commit to his life's work, the multi-volume opus, A Man Without Qualities? Here we have many short works: essays in miniature, scraps of ideas, flourishes of descriptive writing, sometimes only a few pages long. But they are written with such clarity and precision that when the most abstractly investigative piece glimmers like a finely cut diamond. Musil is such an intentional writer. I know that sounds silly and maybe a obvious but it is this aspect of his voice that comes across the most clearly. From the content of a piece right down to the level of sentence construction not a word or grammatical phrasing is taken for granted. I found, while reading, every paragraph was worth showing down for. In fact, as short as the pieces collected here they each demanded such a careful pace of reading that the collection didn't feel as short as it looked.

I highly recommend this volume for anyone contemplating Musil. It felt like an excellent introduction to his work and I came away from the book excited to take on his grand tome.