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(4.5 stars.) Based on The Death of Virgil and The Spell alone (Guiltless and Sleepwalkers are good but not great), I'd say that Broch is the best European novelist since Joyce/Proust and is comparable in talent. Someone on GR described Cormac McCarthy as "like Faulkner, but actually good," and I'd say that Broch is "like Mann, but actually good" (the latter never really clicked with me).

With that said, The Spell is a difficult read. To be sure, there is technically a narrative -- i.e., a vaguely Hitler-esque drifter comes to a sleepy, traditional German mountain village and creates conflict -- but calling this a "plot" is being generous to Broch. Virgil works because of the tight timeframe (the entire book takes place over ~18 hours) and the inherent drama of the encounter between Virgil and Augustus; The Spell is soporific to the point that I honestly found it somewhat hard to keep going, at times.

Broch isn't boring in the sense that Henry James is boring, like where I want to cast Portrait of a Lady into a fire and erase it from the memory of humankind, but more just that when I would glance at the shelf of books that I'm currently reading, my instinct was to not reach for The Spell, because I often didn't have the mental energy to power through. Musil, Proust, and Joyce at least have some humor or lightness, at times -- not so for Broch.

I was continually reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky, actually -- arguably the greatest visual director of all time (just as Broch is one of the greatest prose stylists) but the movies themselves are punishingly boring and largely plotless. I own the Criterion edition of Andrei Rublev and literally haven't finished it (got through the first two hours and said 'maybe next year'); to be fair, I've managed to finish a few of his other films, but it was a near-run thing in each case. In terms of other writers, the density is equivalent to Proust or Gaddis for literature, Hegel for philosophy, Von Balthasar for theology, maybe Hart Crane for poetry? . . . just so much work. (It's hard to think of an analogy for photography but maybe Friedlander or Eggleston, where the compositions are like 11-dimensional chess and it takes some work to appreciate.)

Basically my point is that The Spell is not the sort of book where you can read 200 pages at a sitting; similarly, after about 20 pages of Proust or 5-6 pages of Hegel I generally feel like I'm done for the day. (Seriously, if you've actually understood a single subsection of Hegel's Science of Logic in a day then that's enough, you can take a break.)

Anyway, I'm not sure how I ended up mostly complaining about the novel -- the prose is 11/10, the characterization is more archetypal than realistic, the pace is slow, but I highly recommend The Spell (and Virgil).