Robert Musil is ranked alongside Marcel Proust and James Joyce for his monumental, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. His Diaries, a distillation of forty-three years of material, are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth-century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's notebook that details the moods of artistic adventure. Readers will gain keen insights into Musil's passage from scientist, to soldier, to novelist, in honest passages that reveal the man in all his humor, ambition, frustration, and transcendence.