Young Torless [Paperback]

Robert Musil (Author), Eithne Wilkins (Translator), Ernst Kaiser (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 217 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st Pantheon paperback ed edition (February 12, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394710150
• ISBN-13: 978-0394710150
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,997,578 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant, May 19, 2000

By 

Mark H. (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Young Torless (Paperback)

wow.

this book gave me the creepers. i read this short novel in a class on existential philosophy, and it's the only piece except for sartre's nausea that has stuck with me all these years.

without revealing too much, the plot revolves around several young boys at a boarding school who torture a fellow student-- to see what will happen in a philosophical sort of way. disturbing, haunting, suspenseful, beautiful, profound.

not for the faint of heart.

5.0 out of 5 stars From Back Cover, July 23, 2009

By 

Avid Reader "Jim" (Columbus, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Young Torless (Paperback)

YOUNG TORLESS

Within the confines of an Austrian military school, four adolescent boys become enmeshed in a disturbingly brutal rite of passage: Torless - the witness whose philosophical detachment is threatened by a brief yet violent brush with homosexuality; Basini - the victim, effeminate, weak, seductively passive; Beineberg - the sinister mystic capable of inflicting cold-blooded mental anguish; and Reiting - the unscrupulous manipulator whose power rests on dehumanization through debasing physical torture.

5.0 out of 5 stars Torless Agonist, February 10, 2009

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Old Dog "Expatiation" (The Hill Country, NY) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Young Torless (Paperback)

Set in a military academy in late 19th century Austria, this brilliant debut novel is a meditation on the primordial symbiosis between cruelty and sexual perversion, and, unfortunately, offers a parable for politics and a paradigm for media in the 20th and 21st centuries (I'm thinking of Passolini's effusions, and of certain recent 'home-made' videos of TV and Internet infamy). The style foreshadows Musil's later masterworks--being part graduate-seminar paper and part narrative; but in this debut effort the style is stark whereas later Musil would be noted for his skillful irony (a dilettant's skill). Apart from the stark prose, somewhat vitiated, I feel, by aforementioned seminar paperosis, this novel reminds us why Freud was a product of Vienna. I mean, such frank accounts of the sex drive would not be allowed in English literature (including American) for decades thereafter. Fowler's Lord of the Flies merely hints at the Big Issue. Nevertheless, to be read with Wilde's Picture of..., Conrad's Secret Sharer, Dickens's Mystery of Edwin Drood as depicting the struggles (Die Verwirrungen) of a rounded soul. (Casting stones, are we?) By the way, Musil greatly admired the poetry of Rilke, who as a young boy had been dumped into the very same boarding school that young Musil would attend. Not Mark Twain's view of boyhood, a la Rousseau.