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The Confusions of Young Törless (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) |  | Author: Robert Musil
Creators: Shaun Whiteside, J. M. Coetzee
Publisher: Penguin Classics
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Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 170554
Media: Paperback
Pages: 176
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0142180009
Dewey Decimal Number: 833.912
EAN: 9780142180006
ASIN: 0142180009
Publication Date: September 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"Musil belongs in the company of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka." (The New Republic)
Like his contemporary and rival Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil boldly explored the dark, irrational undercurrents of humanity. The Confusions of Young Törless, published in 1906 while he was a student, uncovers the bullying, snobbery, and vicious homoerotic violence at an elite boys academy. Unsparingly honest in its depiction of the author's tangled feelings about his mother, other women, and male bonding, it also vividly illustrates the crisis of a whole society, where the breakdown of traditional values and the cult of pitiless masculine strength were soon to lead to the cataclysm of the First World War and the rise of fascism. A century later, Musil's first novel still retains its shocking, prophetic power.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
A pleasant surprise: beauty and friendship in modern times. July 4, 2008
Mario Fernandez (Mexico city, Mexico)
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.
An Austrian "Lord of the Flies" July 3, 2008
Alexandra Chace
"The Confusions of Young Torless" reminds me of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". Though I sometimes sympathize with "Young Torless", 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!
 intellectual exploration of latent sadomasochism March 15, 2008
Ingela (Sydney, NSW)
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.
A glimpse into adolescent angst, Viennese style December 2, 2007
Jeff Abell (Chicago, IL USA)
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.
 Young Musil, in a Clouded Mirror August 3, 2007
Robert T. OKEEFFE (Orangeburg, Rockland County, New York)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There is a cult of Musil, just as there is a cult of his truly wonderful, incomplete work of a lifetime, "The Man without Qualities", a monument which casts a strong shadow on everything else he wrote, including "Törless", and also one to which everything else he wrote made its contribution. I will try to avoid the worshipful attitude which is a feature of such cults. "The Man without Qualities" is an immense and complex novel, the first two volumes of which start out as a panoptic survey of Austrian society in 1912-13, as seen through the lens of a planned celebration of Franz Josef's anticipated 70th anniversary of rule, with both personalities and events considered ironically and sometimes presented farcically. The final (never completed) volume, "Into The Millennium (The Criminals)", narrows its focus considerably onto the brother-sister relationship of its central character, Ulrich, a relationship that is extremely cerebral, while at the same time very sensual and possibly even heading toward an incestuous coupling (the novel was never completed to the extent where one can say such a coupling is "inevitable"). While the social framing of the mind of the protagonist (i.e., in the early parts of "The Man without Qualities") barely exists in "Törless", the latter type of uneasy personal relationship makes its first appearance in Musil's debut novel.
Both the style and the scope of Musil's "big book" and his first, compact novel, "The Confusions of Young Törless" are very different. However, there are some commonalities, which retrospectively appear to be what are, for lack of a better term, "thematic obsessions" that characterize all of his books. To see these connections and the recurrence of certain ideas and stylistic approaches to handling them, it helps to have read his Notebooks (also called "Diaries"), which exist in toto in a German compilation, and in an abridged and selected version in English. These Notebooks contain the seeds of characters that appear in his published works, sketches of the relationships among them, and the combination of psychological and philosophical examination to which Musil subjects all aspects of the human mind and the specific personalities which embody it. This goes for "Törless" (published in 1906) as well as for "The Man without Qualities" (first two volumes published in 1930), although the latter is a far more polished work which naturally incorporates Musil's own responses to developments in his own life and the social life of Austria and Germany throughout the eventful quarter-century which separates the publication dates of his first and last novels.
Lest any professor or critic of a certain stripe jump into this discussion with the usually sensible proviso, "Let's not confuse the man with his work, let's not confuse Robert with Törless or Ulrich", he should be prepared to be gainsaid in a rather incontrovertible manner by the substance of Musil's Notebooks, in which he clearly models characters after himself, whether their actions and thoughts were his or merely those which he contemplated as possibilities for himself, or "someone like him" (the notion of human possibilities converted into actual choices and deeds is in fact at the core of his idea of what he calls "ethics", another of his preoccupations). As the Notebook and its supplementary materials indicate, Musil's education at the University of Berlin in both "phenomenological" psychology and philosophy convinced him of the necessity of authorial introspection for the development of fictional characters (and almost all of his characters are modeled on family members, friends and acquaintances). The path to the "scientific" distancing and objectivity which he considered ideal for a writer had to commence with detailed self-examination, although this might be dismissed as something like squaring the circle (arriving at a higher objectivity by proceeding through intense subjectivity). The earliest Notebook entries (1899-1902) contain musings and jottings which are clearly related to the development of the character of Törless, especially his mixed feelings toward his parents and his obsessive examination and re-examination of this own thoughts and actions, which appear to have a cloudy relationship to another "darker reality" which he believes underlies the everyday "normal reality". (Incidentally, one will run across the destabilizing universal modernist influence of Nietzsche early on in these Notebooks.)
A brief word on the story itself. In the main it can be described as the depiction of a triangular relationship, with a composite physical/spiritual bully represented by the pair Reiting/Beineberg at one apex, their unattractive victim Basini at the other, and Törless at the third, vacillating in his relationships with the other two apices and constantly shifting his judgment of the character of the others and of what these relationships mean for him, above all, for him. In a sense, he has little interest in what it all means to the others or to the larger society to which they belong - the others are like a "force field" which elicits responses from him that teach him about himself. He veers between being a tormenter, rescuer, and icy observer, and he finally "opts out" of the local crisis (the setting is in a typical military preparatory school of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which there has been a theft by a student followed by systematic tormenting of that student) by expressing a self-evaluation of his role in the affair in terms that are so existential and hypothetical that they baffle the authorities and lead to his withdrawal from the school. In the frequent moments of solitude and self-examination that occur in the book, thoughts and emotions move like vast cloudy weather fronts within Törless's mind, unsettling him and comforting him at the same time (he takes comfort in the fact that this kind of introspection is his own peculiar distinction). To reinforce the autobiographical interpretation given in the previous paragraph, there was an erotic triangle within his own parents' home, and there were probable fumbling erotic antics between Musil and his childhood friend Gustl Donath (the model for "Walter" of "The Man without Qualities"); these are alluded to in the Notebooks. Such biographical facts get transformed in "Törless" into a rather brutal homoerotic set of relationships. (I.e., again, personal relationships from Musil's life serve as models for fictional ones, undergoing suitable transformations to make them consistent with the facts of the stories and the psychological make-up of the characters.) In the same fashion the admission that Musil makes of a life-long "psychologically incestuous" relationship with his own mother appears in one or another guise in "Törless", "Tonka" (from "Five Women"), and "The Man without Qualities" and is constantly worked over in the Notebooks.
The book is, I think, as incomplete as its famous successor, but this is the incompletion of youth. With regard to "The Man without Qualities" Musil may have come to believe that it could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion (although he was still determined to do this at the time of his death in 1942) because he himself did not know how to put a lid on the "possibilities" of Ulrich's relationship with Agathe; or because he came to believe that "incompletion" was a correct and desirable ending for a novel which would also be a guide to the creation of a new sort of human personality. The incompletion of "Törless" stems from the typical problem of first novels of this sort (i.e., novels in the German tradition of the Bildungsroman) - the lack of distance and the inability to achieve a useful ironic detachment toward one's recent adolescent past, which has an intensity and turbulence that have not yet receded when the work is undertaken.
The translation by Shaun Whiteside is good, and there is an excellent brief introduction by the novelist J. M. Coetzee. Admirers of "The man Without Qualities" (I am one such, but no longer an "unqualified admirer" as I was in my own youth) should read "Törless" and Musil's other novellas (published in English as "Five Women") and his play "The Enthusiasts", all in the light of the Notebooks as a sort of Talmudic companion-piece, to arrive at a fuller understanding and appreciation of the "big book". A final note -- the three-stars rating I give this work is to be understood as a "within Musil category", that is, a rating that is relative to better (more ambitious, psychologically and stylistically) works such as "Five Women" and to the very best work, "The Man without Qualities". (I don't think Musil would quibble with this kind of evaluation himself; the Notebooks indicate his dissatisfaction with and desire to revise certain passages from "Törless" immediately after it was published, especially in the language he used for Törless's cloudy musings about his own recent past and about the "other reality".)
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
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