The Confusions of Young Torless (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (original 1906; edition 2001)

Es uno de esos libros que confirman nuestras más frías sospechas, de a poco. Uno va leyendo con el temor de que se cumplan nuestras predicciones, de haber contado el libro. El libro, por su parte, replica con algunas imperfecciones. Y al final está ahí, un pequeño mundo del que uno puede ser rey o vasallo. ( )

A novel of homoerotic sadomasochism at a boys' military acedemy, and yet -- perhaps really about something else altogether, a portrait of the artist as a young aesthete. Often I found myself thinking of Proust, in his delineations of the fine gradations of interior moods. A strikingly morally ambiguous novel.

Musil's ingenious premonition - the coming desaster of the Jewish tragedy

The Confusions of Young Torless is an incredible book, reminiscent at times of Rilke in its ability to wrestle with complex spiritual and psychological themes. Reading this book was like constantly trying to grasp something slightly abstract, slightly out of reach, though very human and real and rooted in language. This is an ambitious (though short) book, an extremely thoughtful and difficult read.

Maybe it is fitting that the book is so hard to describe, since one of its main themes is the ineffable-ness of certain human experience. One thing the book is NOT about, however, is the "devastating" effects of the "abuse of power" as it states in the back of the book. Sure, that's what happens, but the author's focus seems determinedly "off", always in the head of young Torless, who approaches the events that unfold with a much deeper and complex inquisitiveness than the simple moral lesson/parable suggested in that blurb.

At the center is the metaphor of imaginative numbers. Torless learns of them in math class, and spends some pages thinking about how we can start with something completely real, apply an element that does not exist to it (but we pretend it does, temporarily, just for the sake of conjecture) and that the logical result of that (because the imaginative numbers eventually cancel each other out on both sides of the equation) is a real result. But that the bridge between the two real worlds is one that's completely made up.

This metaphor, though not always explicitly stated, can be applied to many of the themes in this book: the way our conceptions of "self" are propped up by a set of lies we tell ourselves, the way we conduct our lives in the daytime differently from at night (though we need the night as a bridge to get to the next day), the way we can be completely rational with our thoughts even though we are essentially emotional (and irrational) beings.

The confusion of young Torless becomes our confusion as he thinks obscurely about these themes among many others: guilt, shame, pride, sexuality, the contradictions of the self, coherence between mind, body, and soul… and how we smooth over these contradictions of ourselves. The writing itself is sometimes very confusing, I often found myself lost in what the book was trying to say (especially in the first 50 pages, which seemed at times aimless), but it is that effort that slowly begins to make sense as the book reveals itself; as the book gets less and less abstract, the writing itself becomes more tangible. ( )

Wonderful, if at times barely bearable (very disturbing) book. Boys undertake to secretly torture one of their classmates. Very long, brooding descriptions; exceptional psychological acumen. ( )