The Confusions of Young Master Törless

By: Robert Musil

Narrated by: Jamie Parker

Robert Musil (1880-1942) is best known for his enduring masterpiece The Man Without Qualities, one of the great European works of the 20th century. It was with The Confusions of Young Master Törless first published in 1906, a challenging but very different work, that he signalled his extraordinary talent. As the nineteenth century draws to an end, young Torless 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.

©Translation 2013 Christopher Moncrieff/Alma Classics 2013 (P)2022 Ukemi Productions Ltd

Very Philosophical

I think the voice actor did a great job, both in their portrayal of the main character and his introspective nature, as well as the slight change in vocalizations they used when speaking for another character. The story was a bit too philosophical to appeal to me, but to those that are pondering the topic of the soul, it might be just right!