Törless is confused. He goes to an all-boys school. He is confused. He thinks of women. He thinks of men. Things happen. One boy steals. Other boys find out about the theft. They take advantage of this knowledge. Törless is confused. He wants to see cruelty. He's indifferent. He cares. He doesn't care. Visits to the attic and sermons, sermons flavored by Kant, sermons flavored by Indian traditions and myths, sermons served from a confused Törless. Törless is confused. Brian was confused. When Törless started to understand, Brian started to understand. Too much philosophical talk gives me headaches. Then we had WWI, and because we didn't know, we had WWII. Musil evidently knew, but Musil confused me. It was the confusions of an older Brian.

Dying is only a consequence of the way we live. We live from one thought to another, from one feeling to the next. Because our thoughts and feelings do not flow peacefully like a stream, they 'occur to us', they drop into us like stones. If you observe yourself very carefully, you will feel that the soul is not something that changes its colours in gradual transitions, but rather that thoughts leap forth from it like numbers from a black hole. One moment you have a thought or a feeling, and all of a sudden there's another one there, as though it had sprung from nowhere. If you pay attention, you can even sense the moment between two thoughts when everything is black. That moment - once we have grasped it - is nothing short of death for us.

Well, dammit... I went and confused myself again... ( )

Törless has a profound sense of indifference to regular life and a disconnection from his fellow pupils. Despite this, he has been befriended by two older students and accompanies them to their secret hideout in the attic of the school where they make decisions about how to wield their power and philosophies. Although he is with the other boys most of the time, Törless seems to live his life in his own head and on the sheets of paper where he writes out his thoughts and discoveries about life. Much of his time is spent analyzing his new-found sexual desires and wondering if the dark thoughts he has are shared by anyone else. Törless feels the best when he can make himself feel so martyred or shameful that he knows he must be different from the other boys at the school and from his parents and the other grown-ups.

When his two friends discover that a younger boy has stolen money from one of their lockers, they take it upon themselves to teach him a lesson. Törless is fascinated by the weaker boy and his acquiescence to the mental, physical and sexual torment brought on by the older students. Törless always holds himself at a distance from the other boys and their actions, even though he is intimately involved in the encounter, and it is only when he is forced to act that he makes any move to alter the situation.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2009/07...] ( )

I did not find this an interesting read overall. It is the coming of age story of a boy in a pensionate in central Europe. Themes of sexuality, power, homosexuality are explored. I did not like the hero very much. I thought he mostly rambled on about feelings with which I could not identify. ( )

German

At its core, "Torless" is a story about the trials/scandals of a group of adolescents at a boarding school. The boys are at a time in their life where they are escaping the innocence of childhood, but being primed to become men. So we see Torless being confused by his feelings towards his mother and seemingly having a boner for a good portion of the book. I was intrigued by the main plotline involving some violence/homosexuality...both of which seem to means of oppression in the book. What didn't work for me so well was the interjection of musings upon the idea of the soul, and sin, and other philosophical rantings. Normally I'm drawn to books that are able to combine a weird story with rants (Gargoyles by Bernhard, Beckett, etc), but in this story, the philosophy seemed tacked on. Some parts definitely did overtly tie in with the main plot...and there's a good chance that those parts which seem disjointed were purposely included to exemplify the "Confusions" part of the title. ( )