Sleepwalkers

The Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy by Hermann Broch, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 648 pages

The Sleepwalkers consists of three interrelated novels spanning thirty years - The Romantic, set in 1888, The Anarchist, set in 1903, and The Realist, set in 1918.  Although featuring different characters, plots, and settings, the three form parts of a single work and are meant to be read together, the cycle tracing the disintegration of values from the delusions of fin de siecle Germany to the crass materialism of the Great War.  The Romantic is Joachim von Pasenow, a military officer struggling to understand the nature of love and honor, torn between his love for his Czech mistress and his idealized dream of a woman of his own social class.  The Anarchist is August Esch, an accountant who longs for freedom and justice but does not know where to even begin looking for either.  The Realist is Huguenau, an army deserter and hustler for whom everything has a price.  He is a wholly new kind of man, entirely different from Major von Pasenow and Herr Esch, who are utterly incapable of preventing his ascendancy.

The Romantic and The Anarchist are fine novels that, with their satirical take on the Romantic Bildungsroman, resemble nothing as much as the existential novels of Sartre and Camus.  The Realist, however, elevates the whole into a work of genius greater than anything the two Frenchmen ever managed to accomplish.  This is true not so much as a result of Broch's deft manipulation of diverse literary genres - the chapters in the final novel shift between poetry, prose, and drama - as the scope and unity of his vision.  The Sleepwalkers is not light reading, but it is a literary masterpiece.