a bleak, unflinching look at a prep school kid coming to terms with his homosexual and philosophical urges. almost a cross between salinger's catcher in the rye and gide's the immoralist, if that makes any sense. with its ethical ambiguity and deeply un-likeable characters, there's something admirable about its lack of compromise. by removing the very possibility of compassion, musil effectively characterizes the dark impulses that often escape it.

i'm not sure a prep school was the best setting for the story. musil seems to want his boys to mirror political systems (through their conformity & abuses of power), and ends up turning ordinary adolescents into calculating tyrants. the problem, for me, isn't necessarily his bleakness, so much as the lack of vulnerability fitting into his vision. for example, the character of basini-- the victim/"bottom" of the book's sadistic protagonists-- remains a passive "object" throughout. he's a messier character than torless and his mean-spirited buddies. his desires are never clouded in pseudo-scientific experiments, nor do they amount to foreboding philosophical abstractions. basini has the potential to become the most complete adolescent portrait of the novel, but remains on the periphery of musil's ultimate concerns.

despite its tension between visceral and intellectual impulses, there's something excessively dry about the novel. when torless indugles a sordid urge, an odd, categorical distance emerges. the language is one of ethics and boundaries; physicality becomes a by-product of the brain. musil's obsession with transgression comes at the expense of sensuality, and his scope finds its limits, accordingly.