The Mini Moderns series is the latest in a long line of Penguin mini-books. These slim volumes make good emergency reads to slip into your bag and deploy in the event of unforeseen train delays, waiting room sojourns, or other such stray pockets of time. Usually you ask for nothing more than a quick diversion from these kinds of books, but Penguin has kindly offered us real literature: good little snippets that you might not otherwise have got round to reading.

Robert Musil might not be the first name that springs to mind for a series of such slender volumes. He is most famous for his hefty thousand-page (unfinished) novel The Man Without Qualities, an undoubted modernist masterpiece, but certainly not something you can slip into your back pocket. Born into the fading Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1880, Musil fought for Austria during the Great War before returning to a literary career, where he became a pivotal figure in Central European culture, championing the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka.

‘The Blackbird’ is the only piece in this collection that could be called a short story, and as such sits a little oddly at the end of a number of shorter pieces of observation and reflection. Although it is a fascinating addition, the other pieces work better in this mini format. Here the reader is given a real taste of Musil’s forensic observations and lucid, lyrical prose. Each piece is to be savoured, full of brilliant insights. In ‘It’s Lovely Here’, Musil writes about holidaymakers who, if they are enjoying themselves, ”already look forward to the memories.” His description of the unintentionally regimented interiors of Berlin apartments is likely to provoke a shudder of recognition for anyone who lives in a flat or terraced house, where “floor upon floor, the conjugal beds are stacked up one on top of the other; since all the bedrooms occupy the same space in each building – window wall, bathroom wall, and closet wall prescribe the placement of each bed almost down to the half-yard.” (From ‘The Blackbird’.) Musil is at his best when describing the utterly ordinary. A close description of different types of sheep seen on travels would be intensely dull in other hands, but his sheep are full of character, with their “black stocking and hoods against the white fur [which] reminded one of morbid monks and fanatics”.

Nothing is taken for granted in Musil’s writing: everything is studied in close, almost hallucinatory detail. The pieces collected here provide a brilliant introduction to his style, and deliver a near-perfect marriage of form and content that will be a treat to read in any circumstances.

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