SOURCE: "The Unfinished," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXXI, No. 8, April 17, 1995, pp. 101-06.

In the following essay, Steiner discusses The Man without Qualities in the context of modern world literature and provides a close examination of the new Wilkins-Pike translation of this work.

The Anglo-Saxon temperament has a weakness for innocence, even a touch of grossness, in its novelists. It bridles at intellectuality, at the application to fiction of systematic philosophy. The teller of tales—of sophisticated, psychologically refined tales—is one thing. The logician, the metaphysician, the mind trained in philosophy or science, quite another. The term "thinker," crucial to European and Russian culture, rings awkwardly in Anglo-American. It savors of cold coffee cups in what was Central Europe or of Gauloises on the Left Bank. This is particularly so when the term is attached to a novelist. And there is more than a grain of perception...