Robert Musil
I Turbamenti del Giovane Törless

THE REVIEW

Torless attends a prestigious academy, few can afford it, his future will be bright, of bourgeois class, with healthy values, loyal, a bit indifferent to faith but very correct. Torless has only one small problem: he misses his mother. But maybe that's not the only problem since he doesn't get along with his classmates, doesn't grasp mathematics, seems to suffer from derealization, and still hasn't understood anything about the world...

When he discovers with his "loyal" friends that one of their classmates has the habit of stealing money, the real drama begins. They form a small secret sect to discuss the measures to be taken, but unfortunately, they don't seem to have the same ideas. He would like to report him, another wants to punish him morally through blackmail and psychological breakdown, and another would have preferred only to warn him. In truth, the little thief will be repeatedly exploited on the sexual side; Torless is disturbed.

This kind of story wasn't entirely new in places like these, where a pack of boys (even if they were bourgeois) had to deal with their repressed hormones. Torless, destroyed by this inhumanity, wants to react; it was true what a local prostitute said, the "gentlemen" are the most perverse and sick of all.

This psychological novel, like those of Kafka and Pirandello, to be clear, attacks all those now-demolished foundations and all those disorienting discoveries, as was common in the period. Science, mathematics, faith. What really was it, and what was that boy supposed to think? His head was spinning, and he was bewildered by mathematical questions, how could formulas suddenly transform into philosophy?

"In the development of every moral force, there is a primitive stage where it weakens the soul of which it may one day be its boldest experience; almost as if its roots first had to grope and unsettle the ground that they will later support"

A classic book to rediscover.