With Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) Guy Cassiers directs one of the great panoramic novels of the twentieth century. The story is a critical, ironic and grotesque painting of a society – the great Austro- Hungarian Empire – which is dancing on a volcano, unaware of its imminent eruption. Musil proves an engineer of the human mind and also a subtle craftsman who exposes the machinery of political and social life. In Cassiers’ version De man zonder eigenschappen consists of three parts which show the prism of a disintegrating society: De parallelactie (The Parallel Action, part 1), Het mystieke huwelijk (The Mystic Marriage, part 2) and De misdaad (The Crime, part 3). The three parts can be seen together one last time in a marathon session in Antwerp.