Best known for his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil is a central figure in the modernist movement, as important to the development of 20th-century literature as Joyce, Kafka, Mann, or Proust. In Five Women - a book as crucial to the understanding of The Man Without Qualities as Joyce's Dubliners is to Ulysses - he displays a face that is by turns extravagant, sensual, mystical, and autobiographical.