Another great Modernish novel that few today have heard let alone read

Another classic Modernist novel that for some reason few have heard of let alone read: Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers (1928-31, 3 volumes) - which I started reading yesterday. First volume, The Romantic, set in 1888 Berlin and a family estate elsewhere in Germany.Very briefly the initial plot concerns the younger son, Joachim, of the titled landowner, Herr von Pasenow. The younger son forced to go to military school age 10 and into a career in the Army, to which J does not feel fully suited; older brother gets to live on and run the estate. Older brother dies in a duel "of honor," so J may have to go back to run the estate and, presumably, marry daughter of neighboring landowner, Elisabeth - but he is now used to life in Berlin and has fallen in love w/ a bar-girl, i.e., prostitute, Ruzena, who is Czech and not well educated - completely unsuitable marriage from POV of stuffy and hateful father. All that said, this novel isn't plot-driven, although it does have a few beautifully rendered scenes: the father visiting son in Berlin and going out for a night on the town, father tries to "buy" Ruzena for son for 50 marks, a mortifying scene - and perhaps the precursor to the father-on-the-town scene in La Dolce Vita; the beautiful scene of J and R spending a day in the country and falling in love, ends w/ their having sex in R's apartment - a surprisingly frank and detailed description of sexual relations for a 1920s European novel. Most of the novel, though, involves long conversations examining various topics and viewpoints: the morality of dueling, the inevitable rise of the black population in the African colonies. So the novel feels like a novel of ideas, but as such not as focused as the standard-setting Magic Mountain, in that the ideas arise from conversation rather than from action and conflict. Like Mann and Musil, Broch writes in 3rd person, so this doesn't feel as much like an examination of consciousness as does Proust; also like Mann and Musil, Broch does not experiment in form or w/ language (as does, obviously, Joyce). Perhaps the closest literary relative would be Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz - though the social milieu is largely landed gentry and military officers rather than thieves and other criminals, the mood is similar, examining the dark side of Berlin life - and obviously doing so across a long span of time (the 3rd volume is set in Brach's present of ca 1930).

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