A great work of modernism that's seldome read: The Sleepwalkers

Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkes (I love the title and wish I could claim it, without the article) is one of those novels that sort of hovers on the periphery of the great works of modernism - a lot of people have heard of it (and a lot have never heard of it, I guess) but I don't think it's read often, not anymore at least. German, 1938, and often, with good reason, compared with Musil (and also with Mann and Joyce). It certainly has the epic scope of the great works of modernism, but on the other hand is not as initially appealing as the works of Mann or Joyce - the plot is a little too peculiar, the style is analytic without the free-floating interior life of the great modernists, the language is a bit esoteric rather that lyrical like Joyce or Proust or Faulkner - in short, it's very much like The Man Without Qualities, which is on my list (see other posts) of great but unreadable (or at least unfinishable - by me, and by Musil himself for that matter) novels. Sleepwalkers weighs in at a welterweight 600 pages or so, and is therefore less daunting the Qualities. Falls into 3 sections, each perhaps a short novella in itself; I'm about halfway through the first section, the Romantic, evidently an ironic title as the main character Joachim is anything but: it's a story about oppositions, Joachim the soldier (though he wished he could have stayed home and run the family farm) v his brother, Helmeth, who dies in a duel over honor (something to do with a woman - never made clear to us). Joachim falls in love, kind of, with a bar girl from "Bohemia," evidently quite beautiful but not evidently very intelligent and in a different social class, obviously. To make matters complicated, his father, a hateful and tyrannical man (shades of Kafka here) on a visit to Joachim in Berlin, tries to pick up the girl, Rozena - so this is a real Oedipal struggle going on here. Joachim also, irrationally, fears several rivals, including his best friend and sometimes antagonist, who left the army for the business world. Also, father is trying to set up a marriage between Joachim and a wealthy young woman, Elisabeth, who is virginal - and Joachim is drawn to her as well - he wants both wife and mistress, apparently. This is all the setup for events that will follow - though the novel has the odd sense, much like Musil, of strange and obsessive characters who pass through the world seeming to be ordinary and conventional- making it that much more disturbing and odd than the more flamboyantly bizarre mid-century modernism such as Bulgakov.