The Man Without Qualities (1930–43; German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is an unfinished novel in three books by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. The novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's last days, and the plot often veers into allegorical dissections of a wide range of human themes and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organises ideas, though the book is over a thousand pages long and no one theme dominates. The first book, entitled "A Sort of Introduction", is an introduction of the protagonist, a 32-year old mathematician named Ulrich who is in search of a sense of life and reality but fails to find it. His ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities," depending on the outer world to form his character. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude. Musil said that it was not .. …