Timeline

• Mar 26, 2026: started reading.
• May 11, 2026: finished reading.

Review

Nothing but respect and admiration for a debut novel that comes out when its author is 45 years old.

This is a very dense and detailed book; or rather, 3 books stacked end-to-end. Each one focuses on a different protagonist and is written very effectively in a style to match. The Sleepwalkers in question are the protagonists. Men who find themselves between great societal shifts as Europe slouches its way toward (and through) World War I.

I enjoyed it in parts and felt quite lost in others. Broch, more than any writer of the time period that I have read, has an uncanny ability to connect the internal psychology of his characters to the broader sociological structures they are trapped in.

That being said, this is definitely not a book for the faint of heart. It’s easy to get bogged down in some of the more abstruse passages. This is especially the case in portions of the third book (”The Realist”) where Broch intentionally breaks up the narrative form to include long philosophical discursions elaborating on what he is trying to do with the rest of the text. It felt a bit like trying to read the novel and the academic literature on the novel at the same time.

As I read, I did find myself wondering how much of Broch’s style and philosophical precision had been sanded away by the translation. Whether the original text is as dense, erudite, and opaque in the original German. But that’s ultimately a question best left to the academics.

I’ll certainly give The Death of Virgil a shot after this, but it will have to wait a few years.