Saturday, November 02, 2002

A rainy, rainy day in Vienna. Now it looks like I am stuck here over the weekend waiting for some important news from Mongolia. I am starting to feel like a character from the movie The Third Man, doomed forever to wander the damp, gray streets of Vienna. On a brighter note I found a great bookstore called Shakespeare and Co in a small alley off Hohler Markt. Had an brief conversation with the proprietess about Claudio Magris's great book Danube and then bought a copy of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which is of course the classic book about Vienna. I accidently picked up the second volume, which is about 5 inches thick, and which is actually an edited collection of outtakes on The Man Without Qualities put together after Musil's death. The woman who runs the store said she may be the only person who has read this.