Agathe
Or, The Forgotten Sister
$35.17
- Paperback
400 pages
- Release Date
17 December 2019
Summary
From the author of ‘A Man without Qualities,’ a novel about spirituality in the modern world.
Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781681373836 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1681373831 |
| Author: | Robert Musil, Joel Agee |
| Publisher: | New York Review Books |
| Imprint: | NYRB Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 400 |
| Release Date: | 17 December 2019 |
| Weight: | 412g |
| Dimensions: | 203mm x 127mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
Shortlisted for the 2020 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize
“Agathe is 350 pages, a respectable length, and yet it feels—especially against the perspective of the nihil alienum, all-singing, all-dancing Man Without Qualities—almost like a novella…. It reads like a book Agee was born to translate. I wonder if I have ever read a better translation. The book shines with pleasure, the complex sentences opening in front of you, balanced and sequential and easy to follow in all their twists and curlicues… A superlative translation, it is equally good over long distances (making it less susceptible to quotation), and in bravura passages timed to perfection[.]“—Michael Hofmann, New York Review of Books
”Agathe represents a kind of concentrate of the quests and questions of its monumental source material: in it, as George Steiner once wrote about part three of the original novel, ‘what was previous a kaleidoscope narrows to a laser’… . Musil’s sentences are never less than elegant (a handsome precision reflected in Joel Agee’s translation).” —Julian Evans, The Daily Telegraph
“In Agee’s vividly contemporary and sensuous translation, Agathe zeroes in on a quasi-mystical adventure in living and loving.” —Lisa Appignanesi, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] valuable addition to modernist European literature.” —Kirkus
“Incredibly erotic.” —BBC4’s Saturday Sounds
“Musil’s writing is so disciplined, his word choice so exact, that sentence follows sentence with a pointedness that seems to come naturally.”—J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
“Musil, as much as Joyce, is an intensely personal and domestic bard, although all great writers can of course be seen, or can see themselves, as prophets of political doom, civilization’s collapse.”—John Bayley, The New York Review of Books
About The Author
Robert Musil
Robert Musil (1880-1942) is the author of The Confusions of Young T rless, Five Women, The Man Without Qualities, and The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. His works were banned by the Nazis, and he and his Jewish wife went into exile during World War II. He died of a stroke in 1942.
Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has received several prizes, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 2008 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s verse play Penthesilea. He is the author of two memoirs–Twelve Years- An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear. His translation of Prometheus Bound was produced at the Getty Villa in 2013 and is published by NYRB Classics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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