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Young Torless

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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.

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.

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.

Young Torless and his classmates study at a private boys' school in Austria. He feels somewhat apart from the rest of his classmates, wondering what his place in the scheme of things is. Then, two of his "friends" accuse another classmate of scheming and thievery, but instead of reporting it, they decide to take matters into their own hands. Torless witnesses the sexual degradations through which the accused is placed, which only heightens Torless' need to understand things. Unwittingly, he finds himself physically drawn to the accused boy, something which he is unable to comprehend but against which he is powerless.

A dark and disturbing look at how adolescents learn about their place in the world through power, brutality and sexuality. I was confused by parts of it, as the author threw in much psychoanalysis and delving into Kant which made it difficult to follow the story, reading more along the lines of an essay at times. The ending is dissatisfying and doesn't give any clear solution.