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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #370641 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Released on: 2001-08-28
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
Robert Musil (1880-1942) was born in Austria and served in the Austrian army during World War I, after which he worked as a civil servant as well as a writer and journalist. He is best known for his monumental unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities.

Customer Reviews

One of the important books of the twentieth century
Robert Musil's "Confusions of Young Törless" was published in 1906, the twilight of 19th century certainties (Freud published "Studies in Hysteria" in 1895, "Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900; Franz Wedekind's "Spring Awakening" was published in 1890, first produced in 1906, and banned in 1908; Einstein's General Theory was less than a decade away), in Austria-Hungary, a semi-faux empire taking too long to rot away. The greatness of Musil's work lies in its distillation of the zeitgeist into a relatively simple narrative about an incident of abuse in a boys' academy. The novel, which at times becomes meditation, transcends time and place. It depicts how, not only children but adults deal with passion, knowledge, order and justice, while trying to grasp within themselves that which in themselves they can neither control nor fully understand (ergo the metaphoric use of discussions about imaginary numbers) finally resorting to such staples of orthodoxy as rationalization, dogma and discipline to avoid truth which subverts their sense of whole. Törless, his companions, his teachers and the school chaplain struggle in darkness with their own demons and limitations, deluding themselves as having been truly enlightened in some fashion by experience, whereas each in their own way, seeks only to quiet their own internal turmoil and restore comprehensible order. Törless comes closest to breaking free, but we are lead to believe his own pusillanimity and conformity win out in that nebulous future after the novel ends. (Maybe he becomes "a man without qualities"). Whatever else, the work is extremely ironic, nowhere more than in its title, as "Confusions" are not limited to Young Törless but to the whole world around him. Musil was 26 when it was published.

Sex is a pervasive and disruptive force throughout Musil's novel. At one point, Törless is sexually aroused when witnessing abuse. Beineberg, Reiting and Törless individually, albeit differently, each with their own motivation (which Musil develops with remarkable thoroughness and economy), use Basini sexually. Basini uses his sexuality to press his case with Törless; Törless rationalizes his own acquiescence. All four use the town whore. Part of Törless "confusions" is his intellectualization of his own sexual turbulence: does he act this or that way because what he thinks, or do his feelings shape his thoughts which then rationalize his actions? Is he truly in an intellectual quest or is that only an excuse to give in to sex, however convoluted? Musil does not pose questions of sexual identity, as perhaps would have been posed in an early 21st century work, but he seems to explicitly address the disruptive power of passion in humankind. Sexuality is pervasive and central to the novel.

Some have seen a premonition of Nazism in Musil's novel. The fact that Basini, a rather unsympathetic "victim," is taken to be a jew, contributes to this, though at the time, Dreyfusian France was probably more anti-Semitic than Austria-Hungary or Germany. In the event, it is difficult to divorce what we know of intervening history when reading a text written in German at the beginning of the 20th century. However, any such inference particularizes, indeed obscures meaning, deflects relevance and diminishes the work. What was true and relevant in the 1906 text remains true and relevant today. One of the consistently reliable themes in human history is how orthodoxy, as a governing principle in ordering human affairs, tends to fall apart, time and time again. Early in his life, Musil grasped that, as did Freud (we may be in a post-Freudian, clinically and therapeutically neo-chemical world but certainly the influence of his insights are still very much with us). "Confusion" can still be apt description for humankind: arguably, the delusions, contradictions, and self-righteousness in contemporary, reactionary, America provide a good example. In the end, there is a touch of smugness to the irony with which Young Törless concludes, a detachment, which translates as apprehensive harbinger of our expanding awareness of ourselves, of the power we have, what we can do, and of the absurdly infinite capacity and recondite ways we find to grant ourselves absolution. "Yes we can..." a frightening thought indeed.

Törless, his mates, Basini, the adults, all of us, need ethics, not Belief.

Outstanding Moral Drama
"The Confusions of Young Torless" (1906), by Robert Musil (1880-1942), is the poignant story of a young man who leaves his secure conservative farm home in rural Austria, for the prestige and worldlinesss of a private upper-class boys school. He settles easily into his new school, even managing to experience some grown-up pleasures with a local prostitute. He enjoys his new freedom and intellectual stimulation, finding his new environment preferable to the staid life of home, and his new friends more sophisticated than his country parents. He meets two intellectually confident boys, Beineberg, a spiritualist philosopher, and Reiting, a logicalist mathematician, both budding into youthful ideologues, both naively experimental and both youthfully extreme. Torless is drawn to their dominant personalities, and the three form a small club, meeting secretly in an attic storage room, which the rest of the school has long forgotten.

Another boy, Basini, weak-willed and rather spineless, is caught robbing. The boys have heard his mother called "Excellency" during a visit, but for some reason Basini cannot support himself financially. To find money, he borrows it from his friends, but when he cannot repay one, he borrows from another, in an endless deception. Reiting and Beineberg catch Basini at his game, and decide to blackmail him into servitude, exhibiting the casual cruelty boys so naturally inflict upon each other. Each boy tortures Basini according to his own ideology, the philosophical Beineberg trying to manipulate his soul, the mathematical Reiting trying to demonstrate universal theories of humanity. The torture is not just psychological, but also physical, and even sexual. The entire business confuses Torless at first, and shocks him further the more he sees, ultimately forcing him to take sides. Will he join the game as well, or defend Basini himself, or leave all three to their fate? Will Torless adopt the heartless exploratory endeavors of his two intellectual and stimulating friends, or will he rediscover the old-fashioned morals of his common-place parents? And where are the adults during this brutish tableau? Will Torless surrender his friends to the school's authorities, possibly fanning the flames some more? No matter what path Torless might choose, it is clear the outcome will be dramatic.

The writing itself is first-class. An educated psychologist, and an academic contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil demonstrates great skill describing his characters and settings. The boys are drawn in perfect psychological illustrations of reality, the plot episodes effective and well-conceived, and the entire book superbly executed. Contemporary readers will recognize the same struggle in Torless that William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" would explore a half-century later (1954): How do undisciplined youth behave in the absense of guardians?

In "Lord of the Flies", after descending into deadly primitivism, the youth can only be rescued by outside forces. In "Torless", however, the choice rests upon the shoulders of Torless himself, making this drama far more compelling than Golding's. If not for a few brief sexual episodes, the book might be much more widespread among high schools than "Lord of the Flies". Nothing in "Torless" reaches even a portion of the gratuitous frankness of popular culture today, so I only hope more schools will open their eyes to this superior tale soon. The realistic school-house drama of "Torless" speaks more effectively to the modern reader than Golding's abstract fantasy island. This book can easily be recommended to anyone interested in the themes at the heart of this concise (160pp) and well-written novel: the moral struggles of adolescence, the tension of values between a "simple country upbringing" and the "sophisticated upper-class", and the ideologically destructive potential of both ill-conceived philosophy and pseudo-science.

"Miss. Jean Brodie, meet The Lord of the Flies."
A strange and compelling tale surrounding the misdeeds and sexual proclivities of four boys in a European boarding school. Published in 1906, these are indeed the "confusions" of young Torless, a character tormented by a rationalized sense of objective intellectualism and a literal cowardice in the face of tyranny.

Basini, an effeminate teen, is caught stealing by Reiting and Beineberg. These two conniving little bastards, representives of Europe's ever pervasive fascisim, decide to "punish" Basini themselves, believeing themselves to be conducting an experiment of sorts - "how far can we take this?" What follows is a series of scenes which depict the beating, sexual dominance and systematic breaking down of Basini's pysche. Throughout these events our young Torless, a mostly silent witness to the continuative events, is tortured by his own homosexual longings for the beautiful Basini. Their relationship is consummated in a very delicately rendered scene (Shaun Whiteside's translation is expert throughout). Conflicted by his sexual longings and their inherent ramifications (one must remember this behavior was considered both scandalous and ruinous), Torless betrays his lover. In an effort to disassociate himself from all three "nefarious" characters, Torless attemps to divorce himself from all comlicity in the foregoing and subsequent torture of Basini.

Musil has illustrated with great clarity the cacophony of conflicting emotions which plague most adolescent males. That Torless is confused is apparent, that his betrayal of Basini was on a much grander scale than those of his fellows is just as apprently lost on him. Perhaps a better title for this novel would have been "The Amoralist."