Prélude à l'homme sans qualités

Prelude to the Man Without Qualities, or how an end-of-the-world operetta - this world Musil calls, by a bad pun, the Cacanie - unravels and opens up to something else: a mystery. If the story that was supposed to be told - the chronicle of an empire moving quietly towards catastrophe in the year 1913 - won't be told, what else can happen? Nothing, except a few vague promises, a little traffic between false friends, a vain tinkering with the contradictions of modern life, and in the end: profit, war, nationalism(s). In short, the same old story. In this first creation, the Caute group takes Musil's work, a tapestry of a thousand voices, to invent its own polyphony.