Young Torless (Signet Classics, CT266) - Softcover

Robert Musil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451502663 ISBN 13: 9780451502667

Publisher: New American Library, 1964

Synopsis

Like his contemporary and rival Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil boldly explored the dark, irrational undercurrents of humanity. The Confusions of Young Törless, published in 1906 while he was a student, uncovers the bullying, snobbery, and vicious homoerotic violence at an elite boys academy. Unsparingly honest in its depiction of the author's tangled feelings about his mother, other women, and male bonding, it also vividly illustrates the crisis of a whole society, where the breakdown of traditional values and the cult of pitiless masculine strength were soon to lead to the cataclysm of the First World War and the rise of fascism. A century later, Musil's first novel still retains its shocking, prophetic power.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Musil (1880-1942) is principally known in English as the author of The Man Without Qualities, Five Women, The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author and The Confusions of Young Torless.

Shaun Whiteside’s translations include Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Musil’s The Confusions of Young Torlessfor Penguin Classics.

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, and studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and The Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: New American Library
• Publication date: 1964
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451502663
• ISBN 13: 9780451502667
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192