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The Confusions of Young Torless (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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Customer Reviews
Rating:

- A pleasant surprise: beauty and friendship in modern times.
As the specialized critics have established this short novel was a preparation for Musil's tour de force "The Man without qualities", in spite of that Musil had written a masterpiece of deutsch literature of the XXth century.

The story of the young student Torless penetrates in the deepness of human nature, the lad's philosophical dissertations about math made the reader understand the limits of rational thinking and his refined sensibility toward beauty and friendship made us remembered Achilles and Patroclus agapic love in the Iliad.

To sum up, if anyone desires to read a penetrating story about the complexity of beauty in modern times; Musil's novel based in its own experience as cadet in a military academy is a suitable answer to his preys.

Rating:

- An Austrian "Lord of the Flies"
"The Confusions of Young Torless" reminds me of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". Though I sometimes sympathize with "Young Thorless", I like him much less than Stephen Dedalus of "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce or Holden Caulfield of "Catcher in the Rye"by J.D. Salinger. Though I remember very little about it, there could be an affinity with John Knowles "A Separate Peace". I do remember an atmosphere of violent cruelty and adolescent cowardice which binds "Torless" to both "Lord of the Flies" and "A Separate Peace". I admire all of these authors for focusing so acutely on the sensually disturbed adolescent male--spot-on each and every one of them!

Rating:

- intellectual exploration of latent sadomasochism
I first read this book over 10 years ago, when I came across it by chance (bookshop browsing). Since then I have read it every few years and am impressed every time. This book is about as high-brow as it gets, but it is not pretentious or gratuitously intellectual. Rather, it is an authentic analysis of a sadomasochistic mind-set, mysticism, and the sense of not-belongingness/social alienation. The latter aspects of this book are compellingly dealt with but what sets this book apart is that the psychology of sadomasochistic desire is so impressively explored - I do not know of any other writer who has demonstrated such intuition. Note, this is a rather dark and ultra-intellectual book, so although the homoerotic and latently sadomasochistic erotic content is there, if that is all you're looking for you will very disappointed. Musil is a subtle writer, and it is the mind he examines, not the flesh.

Rating:

- A glimpse into adolescent angst, Viennese style
Robert Musil is best-known for a very long novel (A Man Without Qualities) that few people have read. Young Törless is his first novel, as concise as it is memorable. Rather than a sprawling overview of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this chilling little novel focuses on the insecurities and corruptions of young man in a boarding school. Whether you take an interest in it for the metaphors of international power struggles (no coincidence that the "feminine," exploited boy is Italian), the sadistically expressed homosexuality of these upper class kids, or the psychological study of adolescent angst at the turn of the 20th century, it's a compelling read. It was made into a film in 1966 by Volker Schlöndorff, with music by Hans Werner Henze.

Rating:

- A Reviewer In Search Of An Umlaut
Young Torless was one of the orange Penguins I picked up on holiday. I must confess that I had not heard of the author, Robert Musil, but have since discovered that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, Thomas Mann exclusively recommended his novel sequence The Man Without Qualities and this latter work is considered by some to be on a par with Joyce and Proust. The gaps in my knowledge are legion.

Written in 1909, this semi-autobiographical debut novel takes place at a military academy for young men, presumably somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When one student is discovered to be stealing from his fellow pupils he undergoes a series of tortures at the hands of two bullies, all of which is witnessed by our titular character Torless.

Torless himself never quite commits to joining the attacks, neither does he try to stop them. He finds himself both repulsed by the victim, Basini, but also strangely attracted to this pitiful character. This attraction, and the nature of the bullying, constantly teeters on the brink of homosexual love/rape and it is this element which adds real grit to the story.

The plot itself is fairly simple but the homosexual subtext is remarkably frank for a book written at the turn of the century. When the story is cracking along this is a most engaging and enlightening novel, however, Musil, through Torless, is prone to long bouts of philosophy within the prose and these, whilst integral to the narrative, do slow it down somewhat. Whether it be the writings of Kant or the mathematical problems presented by imaginary numbers, Torless does like to stare into space and ponder such matters for several pages at at a time.

My mind wandered during these sections and I found myself skim reading to the next chunk of actual plot but I suspect there are many who would appreciate both aspects of the novel. Plot-wise I was reminded more than once of Susan Hill's I'm the King of the Castle and certainly I would recommend this earlier work to fans of that book. I can't say that I am bubbling with enthusiasm to read The Man Without Qualities just yet but I will certainly be adding it to the list.

My copy was published in 1955 and translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. The currently available Penguin Classic, called The Confusions Of Young Torless, is a more recent translation by Shaun Whiteside and should be fairly easy to get hold of.

(Originally reviewed on the Me And My Big Mouth blog).

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