Musil's limpid, psychological evocation of adolescent sexuality and its often sadistic eroticism which anticipates the carnage of both World Wars.
As the nineteenth century draws to an end, young Törless is sent to a military boarding school for the sons of the nobility on the eastern outreaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Far from his comfortable, free-thinking bourgeois home and left to his own devices, he experiences the joy, pain and self-doubt of adolescence. He is confronted with desire and love, but also his own cruelty, as he finds himself participating in his fellow pupils’ bullying campaigns.
A dark Bildungsroman which shocked its readership at the time, Robert Musil’s first novel is a fresco of psychoanalysis, philosophy, eroticism, snobbery, sado-masochism and schoolboy humour, a hothouse of alternately repressed and unchained desires that prefigure the carnage of both World Wars.
- ISBN10 1847493548
- ISBN13 9781847493545
- Publish Date 20 November 2013
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Alma Books Ltd
- Imprint Alma Classics
- Format Paperback
- Pages 192
- Language English