Shabbat Reading: Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers

#whatireadovershabbat Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (1930–32; trans. 1945)

There are books weirder than The Sleepwalkers, but none that I know wear such weirdness so lightly. The experiments in structure and point-of-view you find throughout are hardly experimental—not precious, I mean, or flashy—but the logical outcome of what Broch had to say. That doesn’t mean The Sleepwalkers is an easy read. Far from it. But the story it tells of the spiritual dissolution of the German Empire, through the intersecting lives of three terrifying yet ordinary men, has no match in intimacy or panoramic scope.