What do you think?
Rate this book
Intimate Ties: Two Novellas
Two erotic novellas by one of the masters of high modernism.
First published in 1911, Intimate Ties is Robert Musil's second book, consisting of two novellas, “The Culmination of Love” and “The Temptation of Silent Veronica.” Each revolves around a troubled woman in the throes of her sexual and romantic woes, as their memories of the past return to influence their present desires. Musil tracks the psyche of his protagonists in a blurring of impressions that is reflected in his experimental prose. Intimate Ties offers the reader an early glimpse of the high modernist style Musil would perfect in his magnum opus The Man Without Qualities.
Musil’s linguistic facility – the merging of aim, manner and result – is virtuosic. He’s such a consummate stylist that after him Kafka may seem immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious and Walter Benjamin hermetic. And Peter Wortsman’s translation is splendid, succeeding in capturing this author’s unique combination of quizzical authority and austere hedonism.
— Anthony Heilbut, The New York Times Book Review
(These stories) mimic the circular thought patterns of private obsession with such authenticity that they could easily frighten readers ... each novella scrutinizes the inchoate nature of the human psyche with great audacity and compassion, and each functions as a resolute exploration of the limitations of self-expression through language.
— Will Harrison, The Hudson Review
I don’t read German, but everyone I have talked to who does and who has read Musil has told me how difficult it is to render in English the carefully considered but revolutionarily radical way he had with words. Fortunately, here Musil has Peter Wortsman, who works wonders with the text.
— David Keymer
First published in 1911, Intimate Ties is Robert Musil's second book, consisting of two novellas, “The Culmination of Love” and “The Temptation of Silent Veronica.” Each revolves around a troubled woman in the throes of her sexual and romantic woes, as their memories of the past return to influence their present desires. Musil tracks the psyche of his protagonists in a blurring of impressions that is reflected in his experimental prose. Intimate Ties offers the reader an early glimpse of the high modernist style Musil would perfect in his magnum opus The Man Without Qualities.
Musil’s linguistic facility – the merging of aim, manner and result – is virtuosic. He’s such a consummate stylist that after him Kafka may seem immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious and Walter Benjamin hermetic. And Peter Wortsman’s translation is splendid, succeeding in capturing this author’s unique combination of quizzical authority and austere hedonism.
— Anthony Heilbut, The New York Times Book Review
(These stories) mimic the circular thought patterns of private obsession with such authenticity that they could easily frighten readers ... each novella scrutinizes the inchoate nature of the human psyche with great audacity and compassion, and each functions as a resolute exploration of the limitations of self-expression through language.
— Will Harrison, The Hudson Review
I don’t read German, but everyone I have talked to who does and who has read Musil has told me how difficult it is to render in English the carefully considered but revolutionarily radical way he had with words. Fortunately, here Musil has Peter Wortsman, who works wonders with the text.
— David Keymer
210 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1911
22 people are currently reading
335 people want to read
About the author
Robert Musil
308 books1,376 followersAustrian writer.
He graduated military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892-1894) and then Hranice, in that time also known as Mährisch Weißkirchen, (1894-1897). These school experiences are reflected in his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless.
He served in the army during The First World War. When Austria became a part of the Third Reich in 1938, Musil left for exile in Switzerland, where he died of a stroke on April 15, 1942. Musil collapsed in the middle of his gymnastic exercises and is rumoured to have died with an expression of ironic amusement on his face. He was 61 years old.
He graduated military boarding school at Eisenstadt (1892-1894) and then Hranice, in that time also known as Mährisch Weißkirchen, (1894-1897). These school experiences are reflected in his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless.
He served in the army during The First World War. When Austria became a part of the Third Reich in 1938, Musil left for exile in Switzerland, where he died of a stroke on April 15, 1942. Musil collapsed in the middle of his gymnastic exercises and is rumoured to have died with an expression of ironic amusement on his face. He was 61 years old.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
March 5, 2019
I was relieved when I reached the translator's afterward, which explained that Musil himself considered these early-career novellas noble failures. There is much to admire lyrically here, but the plots of these two shorts (one about a woman considering infidelity, the other, more confusing but more directly written, about a woman considering two suitors) disappear into a murk of modernist experimentation. Don't get me wrong: I LOVE modernist experimentation. But the text here is so swirling and oblique that the book's pleasures are limited. Musil thought it was best read 2-3 pages at a time, which corresponds with my experience. I would pick it up, briefly think it was great, and promptly find myself lost in the woods again. It's a difficult book to evaluate, because there are real moments of rapture. Best for completionists.
June 25, 2019
Hyper-associative, long sentence, wildly overwritten, conceptual/intellectual representation of emotion, eros, lust, hands and knees searching the strings of the carpet and the threads of a woman’s hair, searching the stuff of life in sentences that so often go off the rails of good breeding, sophomoric sillinesses sometimes thanks to a lot of alliteration, but it’s Musil so it’s about Reality and God and Language, the characters mythologized — in the second book I actually thought Demeter was a mythic androgynous God of nature presence not a male roommate per the translator’s note. Read this attentively as possible on the train to and fro work, loving how the first novella’s talk of train travel synced with the rhythm of my new commute, how the phrases piled up like the ties beneath me and Claudine. The first novella has some basic narrative structure with the predatory undersecretary bear of a man lurking like a semi-disembodied female presence in a gothic novel — will she or will she not succumb to his advances and her past predilection for infidelities — generally really hung with the first one and liked it for what it is, when it was written, by who wrote it (I’ve read The Confusions of Young Torless, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and The Man Without Qualities so am familiar with the writer who Bernhard called the finest writer of German prose or something like that). The second novella reminded me of the most mythic, refracted, slant, associative, significant passages in The Waves but without the payoff of increasing orientation — it really just sort of unfurled purple-ish passages of significance that presage the mature Musil’s Essayism, sans later sense of humor and clarity and pace. Anyway, I gratefully received this ARC a few months ago and dug it out as the first full read of the new era in the new home. Found it worthwhile as lit-historical specimen, admired the translation’s rendering of the thorny clause-y German, respected the close POV experiment in general, but would really only recommend it to Musil quasi-completists, especially those like me who love Archipelago’s unique squarish format and clean quick layout.
November 27, 2020
I racconti “espressionisti” di Musil rappresentano la più estrema elaborazione di stile sperimentata dall’autore dell’Uomo senza qualità. Frutto di una intensa ricerca linguistica e definiti dallo stesso Musil “incomprensibili al limite del disgusto”, questi racconti rappresentano una vertiginosa esperienza di lettura (anzi, di rilettura). Annullato l’effetto sorpresa del primo approccio (nei lontani anni Ottanta) rimane la stupefatta ammirazione per uno degli scrittori più complessi e affascinanti del Novecento.
October 17, 2023
‘..vazgeçilebilecek her şeyden vazgeçiyoruz, kimsenin yanına sokulamayacağı şeye daha sıkı tutunmak için.’
.
İki kadın, iki öykü, iki korku ve iki aşk.
Birbirinden farklı ama temelde var olmaya dair. Tutkulara ve tutkuyla sarılan şeylerin bıraktığı acıya / boşluğa dair.
Robert Musil şiirsel dili ve birbirini ahenkle takip eden kelimeleriyle iki novellada da zemini kaygan bir yola sokuyor okuru:
Aşkın Tamamlanışı ve Sakin Veronika’nın Baştan Çıkışı.
Aşktan çekinen ve tam tersi tek aşkla yetinmeyen iki karakterde de şunu görüyoruz : korktuğumuz şeye dönüşüyoruz ve öyle bir an geliyor ki artık geri dönemiyoruz.
.
Tadı damakta kalan bir okumaydı Birleşmeler. Ve defalarca başladığım ama sonunu göremediğim Niteliksiz Adam için de motive ediciydi. Şimdi hazırım o uzun yolculuğa ~
.
Anıl Alacaoğlu’nun çok sevdiğim çevirisi, Utku Lomlu kapak tasarımıyla ~
.
İki kadın, iki öykü, iki korku ve iki aşk.
Birbirinden farklı ama temelde var olmaya dair. Tutkulara ve tutkuyla sarılan şeylerin bıraktığı acıya / boşluğa dair.
Robert Musil şiirsel dili ve birbirini ahenkle takip eden kelimeleriyle iki novellada da zemini kaygan bir yola sokuyor okuru:
Aşkın Tamamlanışı ve Sakin Veronika’nın Baştan Çıkışı.
Aşktan çekinen ve tam tersi tek aşkla yetinmeyen iki karakterde de şunu görüyoruz : korktuğumuz şeye dönüşüyoruz ve öyle bir an geliyor ki artık geri dönemiyoruz.
.
Tadı damakta kalan bir okumaydı Birleşmeler. Ve defalarca başladığım ama sonunu göremediğim Niteliksiz Adam için de motive ediciydi. Şimdi hazırım o uzun yolculuğa ~
.
Anıl Alacaoğlu’nun çok sevdiğim çevirisi, Utku Lomlu kapak tasarımıyla ~
June 4, 2023
Tih ogolelih dana kada sve u prirodi visi istrošeno između života i smrti osećala bi setu koju nije izazivala ona uobičajena čežnja za ljubavlju već pre žudnja za napuštanjem velike ljubavi koju je posedovala, kao da se pred njom lagano gasila svetlost poslednje čvrste veze na putu koji više nije vodio ljubljenome već negde dalje, gde bi bila bez zaštite, u meku, isušenu sparušenost tužne daljine.
Muzilova proza je nabubrela od najprijatnije estetske neumerenosti. Mnogi odeljci se moraju iznova iščitavati sa zavirivanjem ispod rečenica jer one, punokrvne i velelepno slikovite, ipak služe kao smernica, prave samo grubi kroki kompleksnog duševnog stanja i unutrašnjeg previranja. Uprkos velikom trudu neophodnom za ovu lobotomiju i prodiranje, koje se nikako drukčije ne moze izraziti do taloženjem stilskih sredstava, pisac tek nagoveštava, onim što je otkriveno, neizmernost i uskomešanost onoga što nije, i ne može biti. Muzil ulazi u trenutni duševni oblik, u entitet sačinjen od kohezije, ponekad izukrštanih i antonimnih vlakana da voljnom čitaocu pruži delić uvida, izbliza, kao kroz nekakvu proznu lupu, na nivou najmanjih duhovnih oscilacija. On uspeva da slojevito iskaže i otelotvori osećanje, koje od inteziteta okošta i postane fizički prisutno i prepoznatljivo u liku ili pojavi. Treba pojasniti da se ne prepušta ushićenju i izlivu emocija već se radi o hiruški preciznim vivisekcijama unutrašnjeg bića, iz trenutka u trenutak, posredstvom misli koja je, uprkos tome što je odenuta, i verovatno očvršćena, lirskim ruhom, izuzetno oštra. Knjiga se sastoji iz dve priče,“Savršena ljubav“ i „Iskušenja smerne Veronike“. U obe, a rekao bih, najviše pri završetku prve priče, Muzil prikazuje onoričkim utapanjima ogoljenu ljudskost, primitivnu srž koja podriva razum, postaje forma samodestrukcije uprkos dijametralno suprotnoj funkciji koju u prirodi vrši. Sukobljenosti te vrste - paradoksalno potvrđivanje vernosti kroz nevernost, ljubav pothranjena željom za ljubavnikovom smrću, nesklad stvarnosti i osećanja - već samim postojanjem, a još više kada lik počne da gubi bitku, čitaocu (bar ovom) stvara nelagodu, mučninu, i, u istom maniru, milinu jer je valjano iznuđena.
Likove priča pronalazim, u značajnoj meri, i u njegovom romanu „Čovek bez osobina“ te nije isključeno da nehatno dopunjujem ovde ponuđeno, piščevim, kasnije nastalim i bolje rafinisanim (po izvesnoj ceni) formulacijama. Što se mene tiče – a ne krijem potpunu pristrasnost kada je reč o Muzilovim delima – ovo je pun pogodak.
...počela je da oseća kako joj više nije potrebna njegova prisutnost, njegovo stvarno postojanje, to osećanje je teško pritiskalo nešto u njoj, što je, zajedno sa uspomenom na njega, htelo negde da se uzdigne; svuda se sudarala sa njegovom životnošću kao što se čovek sudara sa mrtvim telom koje je ukočeno i neprijateljsko i opire se svim nastojanjima da se odgurne u stranu.
Muzilova proza je nabubrela od najprijatnije estetske neumerenosti. Mnogi odeljci se moraju iznova iščitavati sa zavirivanjem ispod rečenica jer one, punokrvne i velelepno slikovite, ipak služe kao smernica, prave samo grubi kroki kompleksnog duševnog stanja i unutrašnjeg previranja. Uprkos velikom trudu neophodnom za ovu lobotomiju i prodiranje, koje se nikako drukčije ne moze izraziti do taloženjem stilskih sredstava, pisac tek nagoveštava, onim što je otkriveno, neizmernost i uskomešanost onoga što nije, i ne može biti. Muzil ulazi u trenutni duševni oblik, u entitet sačinjen od kohezije, ponekad izukrštanih i antonimnih vlakana da voljnom čitaocu pruži delić uvida, izbliza, kao kroz nekakvu proznu lupu, na nivou najmanjih duhovnih oscilacija. On uspeva da slojevito iskaže i otelotvori osećanje, koje od inteziteta okošta i postane fizički prisutno i prepoznatljivo u liku ili pojavi. Treba pojasniti da se ne prepušta ushićenju i izlivu emocija već se radi o hiruški preciznim vivisekcijama unutrašnjeg bića, iz trenutka u trenutak, posredstvom misli koja je, uprkos tome što je odenuta, i verovatno očvršćena, lirskim ruhom, izuzetno oštra. Knjiga se sastoji iz dve priče,“Savršena ljubav“ i „Iskušenja smerne Veronike“. U obe, a rekao bih, najviše pri završetku prve priče, Muzil prikazuje onoričkim utapanjima ogoljenu ljudskost, primitivnu srž koja podriva razum, postaje forma samodestrukcije uprkos dijametralno suprotnoj funkciji koju u prirodi vrši. Sukobljenosti te vrste - paradoksalno potvrđivanje vernosti kroz nevernost, ljubav pothranjena željom za ljubavnikovom smrću, nesklad stvarnosti i osećanja - već samim postojanjem, a još više kada lik počne da gubi bitku, čitaocu (bar ovom) stvara nelagodu, mučninu, i, u istom maniru, milinu jer je valjano iznuđena.
Likove priča pronalazim, u značajnoj meri, i u njegovom romanu „Čovek bez osobina“ te nije isključeno da nehatno dopunjujem ovde ponuđeno, piščevim, kasnije nastalim i bolje rafinisanim (po izvesnoj ceni) formulacijama. Što se mene tiče – a ne krijem potpunu pristrasnost kada je reč o Muzilovim delima – ovo je pun pogodak.
...počela je da oseća kako joj više nije potrebna njegova prisutnost, njegovo stvarno postojanje, to osećanje je teško pritiskalo nešto u njoj, što je, zajedno sa uspomenom na njega, htelo negde da se uzdigne; svuda se sudarala sa njegovom životnošću kao što se čovek sudara sa mrtvim telom koje je ukočeno i neprijateljsko i opire se svim nastojanjima da se odgurne u stranu.
August 26, 2022
La percezione alla base dell’Io: manuale di demolizione del racconto ottocentesco
Non è affatto facile, soprattutto per un dilettante quale sono, dire qualcosa di sensato in merito ai due racconti che compongono Incontri, da me letto nella classica edizione Einaudi ma oggi reso disponibile in libreria da un’altra casa editrice con una nuova traduzione.
Non è facile innanzitutto per la complessità dei due racconti, che in poco più di cento pagine dispiegano una prosa che come una schiuma si insinua e si espande a riempire di sensazioni e di percezioni interiori delle due protagoniste i grandi vuoti che si aprono tra i pochi fatti che accadono, rendendo necessaria una lettura attenta ed estremamente concentrata del testo; non è facile inoltre in quanto, anche laddove si sia interiorizzata la prosa di Musil, una analisi plausibile di questi due racconti non è praticamente possibile senza la conoscenza puntuale dell’orizzonte culturale, filosofico ed anche scientifico entro il quale lo scrittore austriaco si muoveva. Se questo è vero in generale per ogni opera d’arte, è però anche vero che in molti casi l’opera si propone al fruitore per così dire nella sua nudità, e può essere apprezzata e compresa a vari livelli, a seconda della sua sensibilità e dei suoi interessi. Tipicamente ciò accade con il grande romanzo borghese di stampo realista: Robinson Crusoe, tanto per portare un esempio che vada alle origini, è innanzitutto una grande e avvincente storia avventurosa, che può essere letta ed apprezzata come tale anche senza riflettere esplicitamente sul fatto che il protagonista rappresenta il prototipo dell’homo faber in grado di reagire contro le avversità, di piegare alle sue esigenze la natura selvaggia, di utilizzare esseri umani inferiori per la propria sopravvivenza.
Nella sua opera oggettivamente necessaria di demolizione di questo modello di romanzo, la grande letteratura del primo ‘900, la letteratura della crisi, non solo riduce definitivamente a macerie il dogma delle tre unità aristoteliche, la cui distruzione era per la verità iniziata molto prima, ma ne annulla le componenti, scoprendo che un’opera letteraria può non contenere alcuna azione, né riferirsi ad alcun tempo o spazio. L’irrompere sulla scena della psicanalisi e dell’inconscio, le nuove scoperte della fisica, da Bohr ad Einstein sino al principio di indeterminatezza di Heisenberg, stavano mandando definitivamente in soffitta gli stessi assunti scientifici su cui si era basato il meccanicismo positivista di stampo ottocentesco, dopo che l’evoluzione dei rapporti sociali ne aveva messo in crisi gli assunti ideologici. Vale la pena riportare una frase di Werner Heisenberg, ripresa da un manoscritto del 1942 chiamato significativamente Ordinamento della realtà, per avere l’idea della portata rivoluzionaria che le teorie fisiche sviluppate negli primi decenni del ‘900, ancora oggi costituenti la base delle ricerche in tale ambito, hanno avuto sulle certezze che avevano governato il mondo e il comune sentire da oltre due secoli. Dice Heisenberg:
”Nell'ambito della realtà le cui condizioni sono formulate dalla teoria quantistica, le leggi naturali non conducono quindi a una completa determinazione di ciò che accade nello spazio e nel tempo; l'accadere [...] è piuttosto rimesso al gioco del caso.” È evidente l’importanza epistemologica ma più in generale culturale di una tale affermazione che, sia pure molto successiva ad essa, potrebbe essere messa in esergo ai due racconti che compongono Incontri, in modo particolare al primo.
Robert Musil è forse lo scrittore della prima metà del ‘900 nella cui opera più si intrecciano tematiche derivate da conoscenze di ordine filosofico e scientifico, essendo ciò emblematicamente rappresentato dalle sue due lauree, in ingegneria e filosofia. Figlio della media borghesia austriaca, si laureò infatti in ingegneria nel 1901, quindi a Berlino nel 1908 in filosofia, con una tesi su Ernst Mach, fondatore dell’empiriocriticismo. Due anni prima aveva pubblicato il suo primo romanzo, I turbamenti del giovane Törless, con ottimi riscontri da parte della critica. La sua produzione letteraria, interrotta anche dalla guerra, fu molto discontinua: oltre ad alcuni saggi e ai diari, pubblicati postumi, scrisse alcuni racconti, raccolti nei volumi Incontri (1911) e Tre donne (1924) ed un paio di opere teatrali: dal 1929 alla morte, che lo colse esiliato in Svizzera nel 1942, lavorò a L’uomo senza qualità, lasciato incompiuto.
La presenza nella sua bibliografia di un’opera tanto ingombrante ha inevitabilmente condizionato l’attenzione della critica e dei lettori per questo scrittore. A differenza di Proust, tuttavia, Musil non può essere considerato autore di una sola opera, in quanto la produzione precedente L’uomo senza qualità non rappresenta solo la preparazione dell’opera maggiore, trattandosi di opere che brillano di una notevole luce propria.
Incontri, nell’originale Vereinigungen, che come spesso capita con il tedesco ha un significato non esattamente traducibile con un unico termine italiano, tanto da essere stato tradotto anche come congiunzioni e potrebbe, a mio avviso con forse maggiore sottigliezza, essere reso anche con associazioni, considerata l’importanza che nei due racconti assumono le metafore come modalità di rappresentazione della percezione, si apre con Il compimento dell’amore, all’apparenza una banale storia di adulterio, attorno alla quale Musil costruisce quello che può essere considerato uno dei testi più complessi del primo novecento. Per inciso, l’adulterio assume nell’opera di Musil una precisa importanza, forse anche perché sua madre ebbe una lunga relazione con un amico di famiglia, tollerata dal marito, e ciò segnò non poco gli anni giovanili dell’autore.
La protagonista è Claudine, signora della buona borghesia che intuiamo essere sulla soglia della mezza età: i fatti narrati sono pochi ed essenziali. La conosciamo la sera prima della partenza per andare a visitare l’unica figlia Lilli, in collegio in una città di provincia. Chiede al marito di accompagnarla, ma questi ribadisce che non può, per motivi di lavoro. Mentre bevono il te discutono del personaggio di un libro, tale G., che corrompe bambini, chiedendosi se sia cosciente di fare il male.
La mattina dopo Claudine è alla stazione e, nell’unico intervento diretto del narratore, veniamo a sapere che Lilli non è figlia dell’attuale marito, ma di una breve relazione con un dentista statunitense, avuta durante il primo matrimonio. Claudine ha infatti avuto in gioventù una vita sessuale intensa, dandosi spesso ad estranei sino ad umiliarsi, e solo il secondo matrimonio, l’amore per il suo attuale marito le ha fatto cambiare vita. Claudine però è a disagio, e il viaggio da sola, l’allontanarsi per la prima volta dal marito la fanno ripensare al suo passato, ad un’altra sé stessa che sembra riaffiorare contro la sua volontà. In treno è seduto un signore, con il quale a tratti conversa, che è diretto nello stesso luogo. In albergo, nella notte i suoi fantasmi di un tempo riappaiono angosciosi ma netti. La mattina dopo, la cittadina è sommersa dalla neve, e la protagonista, dopo aver parlato con i professori della figlia, reincontra il signore, un consigliere ministeriale, che le fa una corte esplicita: Claudine sente che gli si concederà, e così effettivamente avviene un paio di notti dopo.
Banale storia di corna, quindi, ma complicata innanzitutto da un elemento di fondo: come suggerisce il titolo, Claudine percepisce l’adulterio come il compimento del suo amore per il marito, come l’atto che lo rende davvero perfetto: il racconto, che si chiude nel momento in cui ella si dà all’estraneo, termina con questa frase quasi fuori contesto: ”E lontano lontano – come i bambini dicono di Dio: Egli è grande – vide e conobbe l’immagine del suo amore”.
L’importanza della percezione nel determinare l’esperienza e nel determinare lo stesso Io, concetto figlio dell’empiriocriticismo di Mach e della psicologia della Gestalt cui Musil si stava avvicinando in quegli anni, è il fondamento scientifico del racconto. Non uso a caso questo termine, perché alcuni critici l’hanno esplicitamente accostato ad un esperimento scientifico. ”Il compimento dell’amore intende mostrare le conseguenze di assumere l’assioma che l’Io sia una concatenazione contingente di sentimenti, emozioni e percezioni. Se questa concatenazione di sensazioni è legata al caso, come apparirà l’Io nel momento in cui percepisce sé stesso?” si chiede retoricamente Allen Thiher nel suo Comprendere Musil. Senza condividere la tesi estrema dell’esperimento, contraddetta a mio avviso dallo stesso autore, che negava la possibilità per la letteratura di costruire e mostrare generalizzazioni, perché in tal caso sarebbe stata scienza, è però indubbio che tutto il racconto è giocato sulle cangianti percezioni di Claudine, che come detto riempiono gli ampi spazi tra un fatto e l’altro. Musil non utilizza un vero e proprio monologo interiore, ma tutto è comunque filtrato attraverso i sensi della protagonista, dalla folla alla stazione al paesaggio che scorre oltre il finestrino del treno, dall’aspetto dell’amante occasionale a quello della città sommersa di neve; salvo l’innesco diretto da parte dell’autore anche tutto il passato della protagonista è svelato al lettore da Claudine stessa: su questo aspetto è comunque necessario tornare in quanto costituisce una delle principali chiavi di lettura del racconto. Il grande scrittore emerge proprio nel modo meraviglioso in cui Musil rappresenta queste percezioni, spesso attraverso l’impiego di metafore spiazzanti ma che rivelano significati profondi, facendo percepire (è proprio il caso di dirlo!) al lettore il lento ma inesorabile mutare del sentire di Claudine, dalla sicurezza borghese nel suo amore e nella sua conquistata fedeltà alla consapevolezza della necessità del tradimento per il raggiungimento della sua perfezione (esempio preclaro, tra l’altro, di ironia in senso proprio).
Tutto bene, dunque? La protagonista è una donna che tradisce col corpo per essere veramente sicura di amare con l’anima? Parrebbe di si, ma il racconto a mio avviso è più ambiguo. Infatti, come detto, tutto questo ce lo dicono Claudine stessa e le sue percezioni, ovviamente parte in causa. La stessa protagonista percepisce però anche che la sua nuova tranquillità borghese ha comportato la perdita di una parte di sé stessa, percepisce il risveglio di una sensualità incontrollata e incontrollabile, di un sesso ferino, fatto di corpi ed odori (c’è una scena forte in cui si eccita annusando, carponi come un animale, il vago odore di piedi dello stuoino della camera d’albergo), pensa alla sodomia, alla possibilità di andare a letto con tutti i professori di sua figlia, anche se anziani e brutti, e giunge a rinnegare (quasi novello Pietro) il suo amore per il marito per poter consumare l’adulterio. Non è che allora l’adulterio come compimento dell’amore sia una sovrastruttura morale cui Claudine si aggrappa per giustificare ciò che sta per compiere, in realtà giustificato da un ménage familiare da cui era giocoforza escluso proprio il lato oscuro del sesso, da lei peraltro sperimentato in precedenza? Il dubbio resta, ed anche questa ambiguità è uno dei tanti elementi che fanno a mio avviso di questo racconto un capolavoro della letteratura del ‘900.
Avendo tra l’altro da poco letto Bliss, di Katherine Mansfield, scritto solo qualche anno dopo e anch’esso incentrato sul tema del tradimento (in quel caso maschile) non posso non rilevare come il confronto tra i due racconti risulti impietoso per la scrittrice neozelandese, risultando quasi impossibile commensurare la complessità di tematiche e il grado del loro approfondimento che Musil mette in campo con la pochezza complessiva della storia narrata da Mansfield.
Relativamente meno convincente è secondo me il secondo racconto, La tentazione della silenziosa Veronica, rielaborazione de La casa incantata, racconto del 1908. Anche qui gli accadimenti sono molto rarefatti, più ancora che nel racconto precedente.
Veronika, la protagonista, è una giovane donna che vive con la vecchia zia, e dice di no a Johannes, che vorrebbe sposarla; Johannes, che intendeva farsi prete, parte per suicidarsi (anche se non lo farà). Oltre ai due vi è anche Demeter, uomo pieno di vizi che, par di capire, una volta, davanti a un gallo che montava le galline, avrebbe voluto costringere Veronika ad un rapporto orale, la quale in seguito si fa quasi convincere a concederglisi, respingendolo tuttavia.
Veronika ha quindi negato la sua sessualità sia nei confronti dell’idealista Johannes, latore di un amore forse senza sesso, sia nei confronti di Demeter, latore del sesso senza amore; un giorno si sovviene di quando, quattordicenne, si accorse – giocando con il suo San Bernardo – che questi era eccitato, e si era eccitata anche lei.
La tentazione della silenziosa Veronica è un racconto oscuro, a tratti di ardua interpretazione, nel quale il sesso appare negato da Veronika in quanto necessario ma non sufficiente per stabilire un legame affettivo, in un gioco di percezioni che lo accomunano comunque alla bestialità umana (da non intendersi necessariamente in senso negativo), di cui è una componente fondante.
Pur nello splendore della prosa di Musil, dove spiccano le riflessioni della protagonista - che comunque hanno un peso specifico minore rispetto a quanto accadeva nel racconto precedente - rese ed accompagnate da metafore scintillanti quanto stranianti, il racconto pecca forse del fatto di essere impregnato da una eccessiva attenzione alla costruzione dell’involucro che lo contiene, da un certo manierismo semantico, come desumibile anche dai nomi biblici dei due protagonisti e greco del terzo.
I due racconti di Incontri sono una pietra miliare nel percorso letterario di Robert Musil, per la verità scandito da non molte tappe. Come detto da altri, Musil, da buon scienziato, una volta stabilita una verità letteraria, concluso un esperimento, si dedicava ad altro: così Incontri appare, per tematiche e scrittura, tanto lontano dal Törless quanto dall’Uomo senza qualità. Sta anche qui la grandezza di questi racconti: nel loro mostrarci un sentiero narrativo che il nostro non avrebbe più percorso, pur essendo cosciente, come lui stesso disse, che se lo avesse seguito sarebbe ”divenuto in qualche modo un patriarca della nuova letteratura”. Ma Musil aveva altro da fare: regalarci un capolavoro inusitato.
Non è affatto facile, soprattutto per un dilettante quale sono, dire qualcosa di sensato in merito ai due racconti che compongono Incontri, da me letto nella classica edizione Einaudi ma oggi reso disponibile in libreria da un’altra casa editrice con una nuova traduzione.
Non è facile innanzitutto per la complessità dei due racconti, che in poco più di cento pagine dispiegano una prosa che come una schiuma si insinua e si espande a riempire di sensazioni e di percezioni interiori delle due protagoniste i grandi vuoti che si aprono tra i pochi fatti che accadono, rendendo necessaria una lettura attenta ed estremamente concentrata del testo; non è facile inoltre in quanto, anche laddove si sia interiorizzata la prosa di Musil, una analisi plausibile di questi due racconti non è praticamente possibile senza la conoscenza puntuale dell’orizzonte culturale, filosofico ed anche scientifico entro il quale lo scrittore austriaco si muoveva. Se questo è vero in generale per ogni opera d’arte, è però anche vero che in molti casi l’opera si propone al fruitore per così dire nella sua nudità, e può essere apprezzata e compresa a vari livelli, a seconda della sua sensibilità e dei suoi interessi. Tipicamente ciò accade con il grande romanzo borghese di stampo realista: Robinson Crusoe, tanto per portare un esempio che vada alle origini, è innanzitutto una grande e avvincente storia avventurosa, che può essere letta ed apprezzata come tale anche senza riflettere esplicitamente sul fatto che il protagonista rappresenta il prototipo dell’homo faber in grado di reagire contro le avversità, di piegare alle sue esigenze la natura selvaggia, di utilizzare esseri umani inferiori per la propria sopravvivenza.
Nella sua opera oggettivamente necessaria di demolizione di questo modello di romanzo, la grande letteratura del primo ‘900, la letteratura della crisi, non solo riduce definitivamente a macerie il dogma delle tre unità aristoteliche, la cui distruzione era per la verità iniziata molto prima, ma ne annulla le componenti, scoprendo che un’opera letteraria può non contenere alcuna azione, né riferirsi ad alcun tempo o spazio. L’irrompere sulla scena della psicanalisi e dell’inconscio, le nuove scoperte della fisica, da Bohr ad Einstein sino al principio di indeterminatezza di Heisenberg, stavano mandando definitivamente in soffitta gli stessi assunti scientifici su cui si era basato il meccanicismo positivista di stampo ottocentesco, dopo che l’evoluzione dei rapporti sociali ne aveva messo in crisi gli assunti ideologici. Vale la pena riportare una frase di Werner Heisenberg, ripresa da un manoscritto del 1942 chiamato significativamente Ordinamento della realtà, per avere l’idea della portata rivoluzionaria che le teorie fisiche sviluppate negli primi decenni del ‘900, ancora oggi costituenti la base delle ricerche in tale ambito, hanno avuto sulle certezze che avevano governato il mondo e il comune sentire da oltre due secoli. Dice Heisenberg:
”Nell'ambito della realtà le cui condizioni sono formulate dalla teoria quantistica, le leggi naturali non conducono quindi a una completa determinazione di ciò che accade nello spazio e nel tempo; l'accadere [...] è piuttosto rimesso al gioco del caso.” È evidente l’importanza epistemologica ma più in generale culturale di una tale affermazione che, sia pure molto successiva ad essa, potrebbe essere messa in esergo ai due racconti che compongono Incontri, in modo particolare al primo.
Robert Musil è forse lo scrittore della prima metà del ‘900 nella cui opera più si intrecciano tematiche derivate da conoscenze di ordine filosofico e scientifico, essendo ciò emblematicamente rappresentato dalle sue due lauree, in ingegneria e filosofia. Figlio della media borghesia austriaca, si laureò infatti in ingegneria nel 1901, quindi a Berlino nel 1908 in filosofia, con una tesi su Ernst Mach, fondatore dell’empiriocriticismo. Due anni prima aveva pubblicato il suo primo romanzo, I turbamenti del giovane Törless, con ottimi riscontri da parte della critica. La sua produzione letteraria, interrotta anche dalla guerra, fu molto discontinua: oltre ad alcuni saggi e ai diari, pubblicati postumi, scrisse alcuni racconti, raccolti nei volumi Incontri (1911) e Tre donne (1924) ed un paio di opere teatrali: dal 1929 alla morte, che lo colse esiliato in Svizzera nel 1942, lavorò a L’uomo senza qualità, lasciato incompiuto.
La presenza nella sua bibliografia di un’opera tanto ingombrante ha inevitabilmente condizionato l’attenzione della critica e dei lettori per questo scrittore. A differenza di Proust, tuttavia, Musil non può essere considerato autore di una sola opera, in quanto la produzione precedente L’uomo senza qualità non rappresenta solo la preparazione dell’opera maggiore, trattandosi di opere che brillano di una notevole luce propria.
Incontri, nell’originale Vereinigungen, che come spesso capita con il tedesco ha un significato non esattamente traducibile con un unico termine italiano, tanto da essere stato tradotto anche come congiunzioni e potrebbe, a mio avviso con forse maggiore sottigliezza, essere reso anche con associazioni, considerata l’importanza che nei due racconti assumono le metafore come modalità di rappresentazione della percezione, si apre con Il compimento dell’amore, all’apparenza una banale storia di adulterio, attorno alla quale Musil costruisce quello che può essere considerato uno dei testi più complessi del primo novecento. Per inciso, l’adulterio assume nell’opera di Musil una precisa importanza, forse anche perché sua madre ebbe una lunga relazione con un amico di famiglia, tollerata dal marito, e ciò segnò non poco gli anni giovanili dell’autore.
La protagonista è Claudine, signora della buona borghesia che intuiamo essere sulla soglia della mezza età: i fatti narrati sono pochi ed essenziali. La conosciamo la sera prima della partenza per andare a visitare l’unica figlia Lilli, in collegio in una città di provincia. Chiede al marito di accompagnarla, ma questi ribadisce che non può, per motivi di lavoro. Mentre bevono il te discutono del personaggio di un libro, tale G., che corrompe bambini, chiedendosi se sia cosciente di fare il male.
La mattina dopo Claudine è alla stazione e, nell’unico intervento diretto del narratore, veniamo a sapere che Lilli non è figlia dell’attuale marito, ma di una breve relazione con un dentista statunitense, avuta durante il primo matrimonio. Claudine ha infatti avuto in gioventù una vita sessuale intensa, dandosi spesso ad estranei sino ad umiliarsi, e solo il secondo matrimonio, l’amore per il suo attuale marito le ha fatto cambiare vita. Claudine però è a disagio, e il viaggio da sola, l’allontanarsi per la prima volta dal marito la fanno ripensare al suo passato, ad un’altra sé stessa che sembra riaffiorare contro la sua volontà. In treno è seduto un signore, con il quale a tratti conversa, che è diretto nello stesso luogo. In albergo, nella notte i suoi fantasmi di un tempo riappaiono angosciosi ma netti. La mattina dopo, la cittadina è sommersa dalla neve, e la protagonista, dopo aver parlato con i professori della figlia, reincontra il signore, un consigliere ministeriale, che le fa una corte esplicita: Claudine sente che gli si concederà, e così effettivamente avviene un paio di notti dopo.
Banale storia di corna, quindi, ma complicata innanzitutto da un elemento di fondo: come suggerisce il titolo, Claudine percepisce l’adulterio come il compimento del suo amore per il marito, come l’atto che lo rende davvero perfetto: il racconto, che si chiude nel momento in cui ella si dà all’estraneo, termina con questa frase quasi fuori contesto: ”E lontano lontano – come i bambini dicono di Dio: Egli è grande – vide e conobbe l’immagine del suo amore”.
L’importanza della percezione nel determinare l’esperienza e nel determinare lo stesso Io, concetto figlio dell’empiriocriticismo di Mach e della psicologia della Gestalt cui Musil si stava avvicinando in quegli anni, è il fondamento scientifico del racconto. Non uso a caso questo termine, perché alcuni critici l’hanno esplicitamente accostato ad un esperimento scientifico. ”Il compimento dell’amore intende mostrare le conseguenze di assumere l’assioma che l’Io sia una concatenazione contingente di sentimenti, emozioni e percezioni. Se questa concatenazione di sensazioni è legata al caso, come apparirà l’Io nel momento in cui percepisce sé stesso?” si chiede retoricamente Allen Thiher nel suo Comprendere Musil. Senza condividere la tesi estrema dell’esperimento, contraddetta a mio avviso dallo stesso autore, che negava la possibilità per la letteratura di costruire e mostrare generalizzazioni, perché in tal caso sarebbe stata scienza, è però indubbio che tutto il racconto è giocato sulle cangianti percezioni di Claudine, che come detto riempiono gli ampi spazi tra un fatto e l’altro. Musil non utilizza un vero e proprio monologo interiore, ma tutto è comunque filtrato attraverso i sensi della protagonista, dalla folla alla stazione al paesaggio che scorre oltre il finestrino del treno, dall’aspetto dell’amante occasionale a quello della città sommersa di neve; salvo l’innesco diretto da parte dell’autore anche tutto il passato della protagonista è svelato al lettore da Claudine stessa: su questo aspetto è comunque necessario tornare in quanto costituisce una delle principali chiavi di lettura del racconto. Il grande scrittore emerge proprio nel modo meraviglioso in cui Musil rappresenta queste percezioni, spesso attraverso l’impiego di metafore spiazzanti ma che rivelano significati profondi, facendo percepire (è proprio il caso di dirlo!) al lettore il lento ma inesorabile mutare del sentire di Claudine, dalla sicurezza borghese nel suo amore e nella sua conquistata fedeltà alla consapevolezza della necessità del tradimento per il raggiungimento della sua perfezione (esempio preclaro, tra l’altro, di ironia in senso proprio).
Tutto bene, dunque? La protagonista è una donna che tradisce col corpo per essere veramente sicura di amare con l’anima? Parrebbe di si, ma il racconto a mio avviso è più ambiguo. Infatti, come detto, tutto questo ce lo dicono Claudine stessa e le sue percezioni, ovviamente parte in causa. La stessa protagonista percepisce però anche che la sua nuova tranquillità borghese ha comportato la perdita di una parte di sé stessa, percepisce il risveglio di una sensualità incontrollata e incontrollabile, di un sesso ferino, fatto di corpi ed odori (c’è una scena forte in cui si eccita annusando, carponi come un animale, il vago odore di piedi dello stuoino della camera d’albergo), pensa alla sodomia, alla possibilità di andare a letto con tutti i professori di sua figlia, anche se anziani e brutti, e giunge a rinnegare (quasi novello Pietro) il suo amore per il marito per poter consumare l’adulterio. Non è che allora l’adulterio come compimento dell’amore sia una sovrastruttura morale cui Claudine si aggrappa per giustificare ciò che sta per compiere, in realtà giustificato da un ménage familiare da cui era giocoforza escluso proprio il lato oscuro del sesso, da lei peraltro sperimentato in precedenza? Il dubbio resta, ed anche questa ambiguità è uno dei tanti elementi che fanno a mio avviso di questo racconto un capolavoro della letteratura del ‘900.
Avendo tra l’altro da poco letto Bliss, di Katherine Mansfield, scritto solo qualche anno dopo e anch’esso incentrato sul tema del tradimento (in quel caso maschile) non posso non rilevare come il confronto tra i due racconti risulti impietoso per la scrittrice neozelandese, risultando quasi impossibile commensurare la complessità di tematiche e il grado del loro approfondimento che Musil mette in campo con la pochezza complessiva della storia narrata da Mansfield.
Relativamente meno convincente è secondo me il secondo racconto, La tentazione della silenziosa Veronica, rielaborazione de La casa incantata, racconto del 1908. Anche qui gli accadimenti sono molto rarefatti, più ancora che nel racconto precedente.
Veronika, la protagonista, è una giovane donna che vive con la vecchia zia, e dice di no a Johannes, che vorrebbe sposarla; Johannes, che intendeva farsi prete, parte per suicidarsi (anche se non lo farà). Oltre ai due vi è anche Demeter, uomo pieno di vizi che, par di capire, una volta, davanti a un gallo che montava le galline, avrebbe voluto costringere Veronika ad un rapporto orale, la quale in seguito si fa quasi convincere a concederglisi, respingendolo tuttavia.
Veronika ha quindi negato la sua sessualità sia nei confronti dell’idealista Johannes, latore di un amore forse senza sesso, sia nei confronti di Demeter, latore del sesso senza amore; un giorno si sovviene di quando, quattordicenne, si accorse – giocando con il suo San Bernardo – che questi era eccitato, e si era eccitata anche lei.
La tentazione della silenziosa Veronica è un racconto oscuro, a tratti di ardua interpretazione, nel quale il sesso appare negato da Veronika in quanto necessario ma non sufficiente per stabilire un legame affettivo, in un gioco di percezioni che lo accomunano comunque alla bestialità umana (da non intendersi necessariamente in senso negativo), di cui è una componente fondante.
Pur nello splendore della prosa di Musil, dove spiccano le riflessioni della protagonista - che comunque hanno un peso specifico minore rispetto a quanto accadeva nel racconto precedente - rese ed accompagnate da metafore scintillanti quanto stranianti, il racconto pecca forse del fatto di essere impregnato da una eccessiva attenzione alla costruzione dell’involucro che lo contiene, da un certo manierismo semantico, come desumibile anche dai nomi biblici dei due protagonisti e greco del terzo.
I due racconti di Incontri sono una pietra miliare nel percorso letterario di Robert Musil, per la verità scandito da non molte tappe. Come detto da altri, Musil, da buon scienziato, una volta stabilita una verità letteraria, concluso un esperimento, si dedicava ad altro: così Incontri appare, per tematiche e scrittura, tanto lontano dal Törless quanto dall’Uomo senza qualità. Sta anche qui la grandezza di questi racconti: nel loro mostrarci un sentiero narrativo che il nostro non avrebbe più percorso, pur essendo cosciente, come lui stesso disse, che se lo avesse seguito sarebbe ”divenuto in qualche modo un patriarca della nuova letteratura”. Ma Musil aveva altro da fare: regalarci un capolavoro inusitato.
January 31, 2019
“…and soon she saw nothing by the never-ending rise and fall of his beard, the bobbing beard of a repulsive billy goat ceaselessly chewing, spitting out a whispered soporific stream of words.”After finishing this book, I considered carefully whether to write a review, simply because I found it unrelievedly tedious and unbearably irritating. As a rule, I’m reluctant to post a negative critique unless I’m able to make at least one positive comment, however, after mulling it over, I decided Robert Musil’s second book must have some agreeable qualities or why else go to the trouble of resurrecting it over 100 years after its original publication? I therefore decided it was probably a matter of taste and would likely appeal to others. It deserved a fair appraisal.
Translated from German by Peter Wortsman (he also contributes an Afterword), Intimate Ties (originally Vereinigungen), is in fact two novellas that were first published in 1911. The two stories were declared innovative works by a handful of early Expressionist writers but were vilified by critics as “chapter after chapter of abstract psychoanalyses” of two “hysterical” women presented in “thick patches of fog.”
Worstsman describes the book as “a soul-searching experiment”, written “in the wake of the stunning and popular success of his debut novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), (The Confusions of Young Törless),” which was later adapted for the big screen as Der junge Törless. He warns one to “read at your own risk” as “those expecting a traditional narrative thread may well be frustrated by the near total absence of signposts and touchstones.”
It wasn’t so much a lack of signposts that frustrated me as the long, convoluted sentences that seemed to go on interminably and lead one down a whinging path to nowhere. Even the author admitted that he could only bare to “dip into one or two pages” at a time. He thought of it as a “verbal collage” but I found his pretentious, humourless prose wearing and rather silly.
The first novella, The Consummation of Love, concerns a married woman’s romantic tribulations (her husband is too busy to join her on a journey) leading to her infidelity. The second, The Temptation of Silent Veronica, is about a troubled, sexually repressed young woman’s traumatic childhood memory of a near brush with a randy Saint Bernard dog and her indecision, bordering on madness, over which of two potential lovers to choose.
Musil’s stream of consciousness narrative attempts to portray the confusion of thoughts and emotions experienced by the women, but he’s no Joyce or Woolf – although, to be fair, he was an early precursor of the technique. His book also has its admirers: the Chicago Tribune called it “funny, sad and true”, and The New York Times Book Review declared it “virtuosic”. So, as I say, much depends on whether one is partial to obsessive, inward narratives that take themselves very seriously.
When first published, Intimate Ties was a commercial flop. Perhaps it will find a more sympathetic readership the second time round.
“She never had a clear consciousness of even the faintest trace of a sovereign self commanding inner restraint in her unhesitating surrender to others. But there was some unacknowledged psychic substrata underlying all these actual liaisons…”Many thanks to Archipelago for providing an advance review copy of this title.
January 20, 2019
Hard to rate, hard to understand. My first Musil, and a self-confessed experiment that baffled people who had received other work well. From the translator's Afterword: 'What started out as an attempt to quickly whip off a text to placate an eager publisher stretched into a soul-searching experiment in the course of which, as he wrote in his journal, "I almost drove myself out of my mind".'
'Two erotic novellas': Modernist, stream-of-consciousness erotica, eventually. Intimate Distance was the translator's alternate choice for a title, and seems to me to better suit stories where women -- the POVs -- are disengaged from men, even in the first story's apparent passionate marriage. She reminisces on her loose years before marriage and drifts towards an under-motivated infidelity. Great cover. The second story has a beast obsession and a near(?) sexual encounter with a dog, so that explains that.
I can't comment on the translation -- unless/until I try the other translations available in Five Women. The translator says he has to imitate Musil's dead ends, unfinished thoughts and ill successes, and he was glad when it was over.
Verdict: Interesting.
ARC from the publisher through NetGalley.
'Two erotic novellas': Modernist, stream-of-consciousness erotica, eventually. Intimate Distance was the translator's alternate choice for a title, and seems to me to better suit stories where women -- the POVs -- are disengaged from men, even in the first story's apparent passionate marriage. She reminisces on her loose years before marriage and drifts towards an under-motivated infidelity. Great cover. The second story has a beast obsession and a near(?) sexual encounter with a dog, so that explains that.
I can't comment on the translation -- unless/until I try the other translations available in Five Women. The translator says he has to imitate Musil's dead ends, unfinished thoughts and ill successes, and he was glad when it was over.
Verdict: Interesting.
ARC from the publisher through NetGalley.
February 18, 2024
Bir kitap ağır psikolojik tahlilleriyle ve süslü cümleleriyle insanın canına ne kadar okuyabilirse o kadar okudu ‘Birleşmeler’ canıma sağ olsun. Ama değdi mi, değdi.
“Rüyalar insanın içinde değildir, gerçekliğin kırıntıları da değildir, bir yerlerde bir bütünlük hissiyle yerlerini bulup orada yaşarlar, süzülerek, hafifçe, başka bir sıvıya karışmış bir sıvı gibi.” 🤍
“Rüyalar insanın içinde değildir, gerçekliğin kırıntıları da değildir, bir yerlerde bir bütünlük hissiyle yerlerini bulup orada yaşarlar, süzülerek, hafifçe, başka bir sıvıya karışmış bir sıvı gibi.” 🤍
July 20, 2012
Incantevole il modo in cui scrive Musil. Affascinante il modo in cui utilizza la trama circolare per condurci fino all'animo dei personaggi.
July 28, 2021
i love Musil, and as such, it is with a heavy heart that i must report: these kind of suck and Zweig manages the whole psychological itemization thing here way better and more stylishly. probably don’t bother unless you’re a Musil completionist
January 19, 2020
Savršeno.
April 11, 2025
The prose is chilling due to, equally, its alien style and topics. The topics, I think, are certain aspects of the mind, which I’ll mention below. Musil’s writing amounts to pushing our attention far out to extreme extents of detail of the mind, or to faraway terrains of the psyche that one hadn’t known existed.
Before going into those topics, one further note on prose. The translator Peter Wortsman offers his introduction to the text, of a sort that is usually placed before the text. In this edition, it is placed only as an afterword. I’m glad it was sequenced like this. It was a struggle to read the books. In this introduction, Wortsman lets us know that these publications were flops, and Musil admitted they were failures. They were failures of not any attempt at writing a story, however.
Musil considered these novellas to be literary experiments, according to Wortsman. I don’t know what he could’ve meant by this, but here is how I can make sense of his style. Musil often launches out from a detail of a scene (e.g., the smirk on a stranger’s face, the warmth of jointly attending to something with someone you love) to a metaphor. It lasts often for just an embedded clause. But in one sentence, where (as usual) numerous details of a scene are named, one encounters numerous different far-out metaphors like this. Embedded clauses take a reader out from what’s literally going on to these scenes to which something only tiny are compared.
This can make it quite difficult to follow what is happening. Some metaphors feel awkward, and many are mixed, even within the same sentence. The effect can be wondrous, however. It is like placing a microscope upon one’s feeling. An overall emotion, like of love or anxiety, is revealed, under Musil’s careful hands, to consist in many currents, going each in their own path and direction. Musil enables the reader to get very close to one’s own heart and mind; the intangible becomes tangible. (I have examples from the text on this below).
I think the fact that Musil’s experiment is a “failure” shouldn’t be viewed as due to his flaws as a writer. Rather, I’m inclined to view this as due to limitations of our human cognition, as readers. We need certainty. We need enough details in a series to be concrete (i.e., literal) in order to be able to intuitively see the flow of events in time, or to be able to trace a character’s motions, of body or mind. Musil violates that. Ideally, we’d have long enough attention spans, or large enough working memories, so that Musil can take us into he places he envisions for us.
Musil’s style isn’t just chilling and alien. It is inspiring. It is a paragon of language use that breaks from everyday patterns. I didn’t even know that language could be used like this. In effect, Musil shows that how we ordinarily use language constrains us in what we can know about ourselves and each other. By using language in his bizarre way, new horizons can be seen.
Okay, thoughts on Musil’s style aside. Of the two stories, the first is relatively more of a narrative in form. I’m fascinated by what happens there. The protagonist Claudine has a dark past, before having met her husband, of compulsively sleeping with strangers. When she goes for a trip and is separated physically from her husband for the first time since their marriage, she all a sudden finds herself in a similar psychic landscape as that of her past. This story left me with various threads needing further tugging. For one, I’m thinking about how Claudine appears to be both radically free but also confused—she is alienated from social interactions in general and from her lust and urges in general. This confusion enables her to not take a certain stable narrative of her life for granted. She has to wrestle with memory and present to herself what she knows to be real. It was interesting to behold all of this, as Musil reveals.
Another thread I’d like to follow is the meaning of sexual desire. We’re told that Claudine finds herself needing to cow down and be taken and abused. This is irresistible. It appears to be part of her response to a lifelong sense of drifting, not having a purpose to lead her. To be taken up like this feels right; it both puts her in what she takes to be her rightful place of being invisible and discardable, but it also makes her powerful. I wonder where such desire comes from, in general, and what they tend to be connected up to, apart from just-so stories that could be offered by evolutionary psychologists. Musil offers many details for provoking thought upon this matter, and he refuses to offer an answer, as is congruous with the reality on the matter.
Let me mention some themes about the mind treated here. Claudine is a portrait of how we can be alienated from our bodily needs and wants, and how the body pushes us around when we find it unintelligible (and undesirable) like this. What we know to be true grows dim. Certain behaviors feel right, and we can react with disgust, fear, or a cry for help. Etc. In the second of the novellas, the protagonist Veronica shows how we can desire evil things, or feel nothing in the face of something hugely important, especially when we’re unselfaware, due to fear of who we might be. This dynamic could be understood in the Freudian terms of being repressed and resentful and people who trigger the thing you’re trying to repress. Musil goes beyond any Freudian picture and leaves matters more chaotic and complicated than that.
I want to read more Musil now, but am also a bit weary. I'd hope that with more time with him, reading becomes less difficult. Here are examples of passages. There are so many to quote. I select these a bit arbitrarily.
“What she now felt was no longer just a vague anxiety, but a sentiment linked to actual people. And yet it was not a fear of them per se, but rather a fear that they might get under her skin, as if while the utterances of these people had engulfed her, they had secretly moved and quietly shaken something in her; it was not a single decipherable feeling, but a grounding in which all her feelings were rooted — as when you sometimes pass through apartments that repel you, but little by little you are gently persuaded by the sense that people could be happy living in such a place, and then suddenly there comes a moment when it surrounds you, as if they are you were one and the same, and you feel hemmed in, closed in on every side, you want to jump, but stand quietly in the middle of it all”
“At that moment it was as if she lived with her husband in the bulb of the world in a frothy jumble of pearls and bubbles and whooshing feather-light little clouds. She closed her eyes and gave herself over entirely to that pleasant illusion.”
“Children and the dead have no soul; but the soul of the living is that element of self that does not let you love, such as you’re so inclined, that stubborn residue that stands in the way of all love — Veronica felt that this one unshakable constant, immune to amorous lures, is the focal point of all feeling, clinging fearfully, a private precinct forever out of reach of the dearly beloved, beckoning from afar; and even if you draw near, it keeps its distance, smiling back, as if waiting for a secret rendezvous. But children and the dead, they are either nothing yet or nothing more, giving us to believe that everything lies ahead or everything lies behind; they are like the hollowed vessels that give shape to dreams. Children and the dead have no soul, no soul to speak of. And animals. Veronica found animals terrifying in the threat of their ugly onslaught, but their piercing pupils dripped with dumb droplets of forgetting.”
Before going into those topics, one further note on prose. The translator Peter Wortsman offers his introduction to the text, of a sort that is usually placed before the text. In this edition, it is placed only as an afterword. I’m glad it was sequenced like this. It was a struggle to read the books. In this introduction, Wortsman lets us know that these publications were flops, and Musil admitted they were failures. They were failures of not any attempt at writing a story, however.
Musil considered these novellas to be literary experiments, according to Wortsman. I don’t know what he could’ve meant by this, but here is how I can make sense of his style. Musil often launches out from a detail of a scene (e.g., the smirk on a stranger’s face, the warmth of jointly attending to something with someone you love) to a metaphor. It lasts often for just an embedded clause. But in one sentence, where (as usual) numerous details of a scene are named, one encounters numerous different far-out metaphors like this. Embedded clauses take a reader out from what’s literally going on to these scenes to which something only tiny are compared.
This can make it quite difficult to follow what is happening. Some metaphors feel awkward, and many are mixed, even within the same sentence. The effect can be wondrous, however. It is like placing a microscope upon one’s feeling. An overall emotion, like of love or anxiety, is revealed, under Musil’s careful hands, to consist in many currents, going each in their own path and direction. Musil enables the reader to get very close to one’s own heart and mind; the intangible becomes tangible. (I have examples from the text on this below).
I think the fact that Musil’s experiment is a “failure” shouldn’t be viewed as due to his flaws as a writer. Rather, I’m inclined to view this as due to limitations of our human cognition, as readers. We need certainty. We need enough details in a series to be concrete (i.e., literal) in order to be able to intuitively see the flow of events in time, or to be able to trace a character’s motions, of body or mind. Musil violates that. Ideally, we’d have long enough attention spans, or large enough working memories, so that Musil can take us into he places he envisions for us.
Musil’s style isn’t just chilling and alien. It is inspiring. It is a paragon of language use that breaks from everyday patterns. I didn’t even know that language could be used like this. In effect, Musil shows that how we ordinarily use language constrains us in what we can know about ourselves and each other. By using language in his bizarre way, new horizons can be seen.
Okay, thoughts on Musil’s style aside. Of the two stories, the first is relatively more of a narrative in form. I’m fascinated by what happens there. The protagonist Claudine has a dark past, before having met her husband, of compulsively sleeping with strangers. When she goes for a trip and is separated physically from her husband for the first time since their marriage, she all a sudden finds herself in a similar psychic landscape as that of her past. This story left me with various threads needing further tugging. For one, I’m thinking about how Claudine appears to be both radically free but also confused—she is alienated from social interactions in general and from her lust and urges in general. This confusion enables her to not take a certain stable narrative of her life for granted. She has to wrestle with memory and present to herself what she knows to be real. It was interesting to behold all of this, as Musil reveals.
Another thread I’d like to follow is the meaning of sexual desire. We’re told that Claudine finds herself needing to cow down and be taken and abused. This is irresistible. It appears to be part of her response to a lifelong sense of drifting, not having a purpose to lead her. To be taken up like this feels right; it both puts her in what she takes to be her rightful place of being invisible and discardable, but it also makes her powerful. I wonder where such desire comes from, in general, and what they tend to be connected up to, apart from just-so stories that could be offered by evolutionary psychologists. Musil offers many details for provoking thought upon this matter, and he refuses to offer an answer, as is congruous with the reality on the matter.
Let me mention some themes about the mind treated here. Claudine is a portrait of how we can be alienated from our bodily needs and wants, and how the body pushes us around when we find it unintelligible (and undesirable) like this. What we know to be true grows dim. Certain behaviors feel right, and we can react with disgust, fear, or a cry for help. Etc. In the second of the novellas, the protagonist Veronica shows how we can desire evil things, or feel nothing in the face of something hugely important, especially when we’re unselfaware, due to fear of who we might be. This dynamic could be understood in the Freudian terms of being repressed and resentful and people who trigger the thing you’re trying to repress. Musil goes beyond any Freudian picture and leaves matters more chaotic and complicated than that.
I want to read more Musil now, but am also a bit weary. I'd hope that with more time with him, reading becomes less difficult. Here are examples of passages. There are so many to quote. I select these a bit arbitrarily.
“What she now felt was no longer just a vague anxiety, but a sentiment linked to actual people. And yet it was not a fear of them per se, but rather a fear that they might get under her skin, as if while the utterances of these people had engulfed her, they had secretly moved and quietly shaken something in her; it was not a single decipherable feeling, but a grounding in which all her feelings were rooted — as when you sometimes pass through apartments that repel you, but little by little you are gently persuaded by the sense that people could be happy living in such a place, and then suddenly there comes a moment when it surrounds you, as if they are you were one and the same, and you feel hemmed in, closed in on every side, you want to jump, but stand quietly in the middle of it all”
“At that moment it was as if she lived with her husband in the bulb of the world in a frothy jumble of pearls and bubbles and whooshing feather-light little clouds. She closed her eyes and gave herself over entirely to that pleasant illusion.”
“Children and the dead have no soul; but the soul of the living is that element of self that does not let you love, such as you’re so inclined, that stubborn residue that stands in the way of all love — Veronica felt that this one unshakable constant, immune to amorous lures, is the focal point of all feeling, clinging fearfully, a private precinct forever out of reach of the dearly beloved, beckoning from afar; and even if you draw near, it keeps its distance, smiling back, as if waiting for a secret rendezvous. But children and the dead, they are either nothing yet or nothing more, giving us to believe that everything lies ahead or everything lies behind; they are like the hollowed vessels that give shape to dreams. Children and the dead have no soul, no soul to speak of. And animals. Veronica found animals terrifying in the threat of their ugly onslaught, but their piercing pupils dripped with dumb droplets of forgetting.”
April 2, 2025
“There are so many questions raised in the love relationship between two people around which a shared life must be built before the question itself can be thought through to the end, and later in the face of the fait accompli there’s no strength left to imagine the outcome in any other way. Then somewhere along the way a curious signpost crops up, a face, a scent, a never trodden path beckons over grass and pebbles; you know you ought to turn back, look around, but everything propels you forward, except for a slight hesitation in your step, like the trembling of a spider’s web, like a dream, like a rustling branch, and the intangible fabric of an unrealized idea fosters a quiet paralysis. Sometimes of late, perhaps a bit more often than before, this thinking back involved a more strenuous back bending embrace of the past. Claudine’s fidelity to her husband offered resistance, precisely because she did not feel it as a control but rather as a liberating force, a reciprocal support, an equilibrium achieved by the constant forward motion. A running hand in hand, but sometimes she was gripped by the sudden temptation to stop midway, just her alone, to stop and look around. It was then that she felt her passion as something compulsive, coercive, overwhelming; and no sooner did she manage to subdue that cloying feeling than she was overcome with remorse and yet again infused with the consciousness of the beauty of her love, the yearning still lingered stiff and heavy like a frenzy, and she rapturously and fearfully sensed every movement she firmly entwined in its potent grip as if in a mesh of gold brocade; but something kept beckoning from somewhere, it lay still and pale as March shadows on the bare, broken ground of spring.”
“Then she fancied that she might just as well belong to another, and it did not feel to her like infidelity, but rather like a last betrothal somewhere other than where they were, a realm where they only resembled music, where they embodied notes heard by no one reverberating against nothing. It was then that she felt her being as nothing but a grinding line that dug her under so as to hear itself singing in the tangled silence, in a state in which one moment demands the next and she became what she did – inexorably and inconsequentially – and yet there were certain things that she never dared do. And while it suddenly seemed to her as if it might well be that they only really loved each other in their refusal to acknowledge the clang of that one, quiet, almost maddeningly intimate sound, she suddenly fathomed the deeper entanglements and immense convolutions in the pauses in between, the mute moments of awakening from the swell into the limitless expanse, to face and feel the unconscious onslaught of life; and with the solitary pain of sinking into the maelstrom side by side – compared to which all other actions amounted to nothing more than a noisy benumbing, sleep-inducing narcotic – she loved him even as she contemplated how to hurt him in the worst way possible.
For weeks her love held to this murky hue; then it passed. But oftentimes it returned in muffled tremors, particularly when she sensed the proximity of another. An offhand remark from an indifferent person sufficed to make her feel needled by the stranger’s gazed…stunned…thinking, why are you still here? She never actually craved contact with these strange creatures; it was painful to think of them; the very thought of it disgusted her. But all at once she felt the oscillating, bodiless silence pressing in around her; and she no longer knew if she was rising or falling.”
“It grieved her to gaze at this agitation, in the wake of which her feelings had been left behind. This life that just moments before was still flowing through her, transformed into feeling, she still saw it out there, suffused with itself and in its own giddy grip, but as soon as she tried to bring it closer the whole thing crumbled and fell apart. Repulsive now, it drilled into her eyes, as if her soul were dangling, prone, in its path, stretched and taut, reaching for something, grasping at the void…
And all of a sudden it struck her that she too – just like all that she glimpsed out the window – was trapped in herself and bound to live out her life in one place, in one particular city, in a house, in an apartment, consumed by a single sense of self, to dwell for years in that minuscule enclosure, and then it seemed to her, were she to stop and wait for the blink of an eye, as if all her happiness could pull
away like that clutter of clamorous things.
But this didn’t just strike her as a random thought, there was something in it of that boundless barren expanse in which her feelings sought in vain to gain a foothold, and something took a quiet hold of her like a rock climber hugging the escarpment, and then came an icy cold, quiet moment in which she heard the sound of self, a faint, incomprehensible creak in the vast expanse of creation, and in the sudden silence that followed she fathomed how quietly we trickle away, and in contrast how vast and fraught with terrible forgotten sounds is the stony brow of nothingness.”
“Then she thought to herself: People like us could perhaps even live with people like that…It gave her a strangely needling rush, a lingering brain twitch, covered by something like a thin pane of glass, against which her thoughts were painfully pressed, only to gape with an uncertain distress into the great beyond; it pleased her all the while, boldly and above suspicion, to look people in the eye. Then she tried to imagine herself estranged from her husband, as she might be perceived by strangers. She managed to quietly conjure him up; he remained a wonderful, incomparable person, but having forfeited the imponderable, a certain something her mind could not wrap itself around, he appeared pale and not that close; sometimes just prior to the onset of an illness you see the world with just such a cool, distant clarity. But then it struck her how strange it was that she should once have really experienced something of the sort she now toyed with, that there was a time when she would definitely have viewed her husband in this distant way as she now tried to do, without even giving it a second thought, and the entire situation suddenly seemed odd to her.
Every day you go walking among particular people or through a landscape, a city, past a certain house, and this landscape or these people always accompany you every step of the way, they’re just there without wanting to be, day in, day out. But then all at once, they suddenly stop dead in their tracks with a start and just stand there incomprehensibly stiff and still, detached, in the grip of a strange, stubborn feeling. And when you look back at yourself there’s a stranger standing there among them. Then there’s the past. But what is that? Claudine asked herself, and looking up again, she was suddenly unable to say just what it was that might be different from before.
At that moment she also knew that nothing is simpler than to acknowledge that it is you yourself who has changed, and yet she began to feel a curious reluctance to accept this truth; and maybe, she pondered, we only really grasp the big, decisive connections in curiously inverted retrospect, whereas moments later she no longer fathomed the ease of her present estrangement from a past that was once as close as her own skin, and it seemed inconceivable that there might once have been anything other than the present, then she remembered how when a person sees something peculiar-looking in the distance, and then walks over, and at a certain point it enters the sphere of the familiar, but the spot where one stood before is now
somehow meaningless; one only needs to imagine that yesterday I did this or that: any second is always like an abyss before which a sick, pallid man hesitates, a body just doesn’t think about it – and all of a sudden in a lightning flash her entire life seemed to be riddled by this incomprehensible, unending infidelity, by which, while remaining the same for everyone else, one instantaneously separates from oneself without knowing why, all the while nevertheless sensing in it a last, never depleted tenderness beyond conscious reach, in the throes of which, more than with anything else, the person you are feels completely in touch with himself.”
“When she and the man met up again, it no longer felt like they’d just gotten acquainted, but rather like the prelude to the start of something between them. She knew that in the meantime he, too, had thought of her and had put together a plan of action. She heard him say: ‘I understand why you rebuffed my advances, but never will anyone adore you as selflessly as I do.’ Claudine made no reply. His words were spoken slowly, emphatically; she felt their effect, if indeed they were realized.
Then she said: ‘Do you know for a fact that we are really snowed in?’ It all seemed to her as if she had already experienced it; her words seemed to get stuck in the tracks of words she must already have uttered some time before. She did not remain mindful of what she did, but rather of the tenuous difference between her present actions and something similar that happened in the past; the same capricious, come-what-may soupçon of what lay ahead. And she had a powerful, dispassionate intimation of herself, like little waves rolling again and again over the past and present.
After a while the undersecretary suddenly said: ‘I can sense that something in you is hesitating. I know that hesitation. Every woman faces it at some point in her life. You cherish your husband and no doubt don’t want to hurt him and therefore close yourself off. But as you must know, there are moments in life when you’ve got to let go to give free rein to the great storm of emotion.’
Again Claudine said nothing. She sensed how he must misconstrue her silence, but she found the ambiguity strangely beguiling. That there was something in her that did not translate and so remained immune to the effect of her actions, something for which she could make no excuses, since it lay beneath the reach of words, something
which in order to be fathomed had to be loved, as it loved itself, something she shared only with her husband – this she felt all the more poignantly in her silence; it was the consummation of an intimate tie with him deep inside herself, while surrendering her superfluous self to this stranger who shamelessly mishandled her.”
“She felt so sorry for herself, all the while weighed down by a humming dread that all this could be happening again. The undersecretary said: ‘I can tell by looking at you that you are one of those women destined to be swept away by a storm of emotions. You are proud and want to hide it; but believe me, a connoisseur of the female soul can see right through your façade of resistance.’ It was as if without skipping a heartbeat she sank back into her past. But when she looked around her she felt a certain randomness in this sinking into the sea of the soul, like currents of time stacked one on top of another, a randomness not in the appearance of the things around her, but rather in that this appearance held fast, as if inseparable from the thing itself, unnaturally clawed into the skin of the moment, like a fleeting feeling that refuses to let go of a face. And strange as it may seem, it was as if, a link having broken in the quiet course of occurrence, disturbing the ordinary succession of things and sending them flying out of lock step, little by little all faces and things congealed into a sudden, haphazard composite expression that cut obliquely across the apparent chaos, imposing a new order. And she alone slipped with faltering unfurled senses between these faces and things – downwards – into the deep.
For a moment, the great painstakingly plated emotional braid of her being became apparent, fluttering in the distance, like a pallid, practically worthless backdrop to reality. She thought to herself, you draw a line in the sand, any old unbroken line, just to have something to hold onto in the swarm of silently looming things; that is the stuff of our life; like when you keep speaking nonstop, pretending that each word is somehow ineluctably linked to the one before and automatically generates the next, because you fear the moment you allow silence to strip off the pretense of continuity the flimsy construct of self will falter in some unimaginable way and be dissolved by silence; but it is only your fear, your frailty before the terrible, gaping randomness of it all.”
“And then it struck her in a secret corner of her heart: somewhere among these people lives a person, someone who doesn’t fit in, someone else, someone to whom the others might have grown accustomed, and no one will ever have an inkling of the self you are today. Since feelings only exist in a long chain of other feelings, linked to each other, all that matters is that one moment in life be linked without a gap to another, and there are a hundred ways this might happen. And then for the first time since falling in love she was struck by the thought: it’s all a matter of happenstance; by some coincidence it became a reality and then you hold on tight. And for the first time she sounded her emotional depths, and felt this last hold, this root, this disturbance of the absolute, this faceless feeling of herself enveloped in her love, a feeling to which she had always in the past lay claim, and that had made her the same as everyone else.
And then it was as if she had to let herself sink back into the elemental, into the unrealized, nowhere at home, and she ran through the sadness of the empty streets and peered into the windows of the houses, wanting no other company than the clip clop of her heels on the cobble stones, just to hear herself running, reduced to a mere living entity, the sound sometimes leading, sometimes lagging behind.”
“She said: ‘I have only the vaguest idea of what we could be for each other. We are still afraid of each other, sometimes when you speak even you seem as hard and unforgiving as a stone striking out at me: but what I mean is a way in which we can completely meld into the mix of being two, and not stand by like a stranger and listen…I don’t know how to explain it…what you sometimes call God is so…’
Then she said things that bewildered Johannes: ‘He whom you really ought to mean is nowhere present because he is in everything. He is a fat, nasty woman who forces me to kiss her breasts, and at the same time He is me myself, who sometimes, when she’s alone, lays herself flat on the floor in front of a cupboard and thinks things like this. And maybe you’re just like that; you’re sometimes so impersonal and withdrawn from the world like a candle in the dark nothing in itself, but just a thing that makes the darkness greater and more visible. Ever since that time I saw you shrink back in fear, it sometimes seems as if you’d vanished from my consciousness and all that remains is fear, a dark speck, and then a warm, soft rim around it. And what it really comes down to is that you’re like the action itself and not the person engaged in it; we have to be alone with what happens, and at the same time together, silent and closed off like the inside of the four windowless walls of a room in which anything could happen, and yet just like that, without cutting into one another, as if it were all only happening in our thoughts…’
And Johannes did not understand.
Whereupon a change suddenly came over her, like something sinking back into itself, even the lines of her face grew finer in parts, and elsewhere more pronounced; she still might have had something more on the tip of her tongue, but no longer appeared to be the same person who had just spoken, and her words now came out haltingly, as if stumbling on a wide, unfamiliar pathway, ‘What are you thinking?…No man I know could possibly be so impersonal, only an animal could be like that…Help me please…for heaven’s sake, why does an animal always come to mind when I try to talk about it?’
And Johannes tried somehow to bring her back to her senses, all at once he spoke up, he wanted to keep listening.
But she just shook her head.
From then on Johannes felt a terrible ease knowing that he was reaching past what he really wanted by a hair’s breadth. Sometimes you can’t say just what it is that you darkly crave, but you know that it is going to slip through your fingers; you then live out the rest of your life as if in a locked room afraid to leave. It sometimes worried him that he might suddenly feel the uncontrollable urge to burst out
whimpering and get down on his hands and knees and sniff at Veronica’s hair; such notions crossed his mind. But nothing happened.”
“Children and the dead have no soul; but the soul of the living is that element of self that does not let you love, much as you’re so inclined, that stubborn residue that stands in the way of all love – Veronica felt that this one unshakable constant, immune to amorous lures, is the focal point of all feeling, clinging fearfully, a private precinct forever out of reach of the dearly beloved, beckoning from afar; and even if you draw near, it keeps its distance, smiling back, as if waiting for a secret rendezvous. But children and the dead, they are either nothing yet or nothing more, giving us to believe that everything lies ahead or everything lies behind; they are like the hollowed vessels that give shape to dreams. Children and the dead have no soul, no soul to speak of. And animals. Veronica found animals terrifying in the threat of their ugly onslaught, but their piercing pupils dripped with dumb droplets of forgetting.
Soul is something of the sort, a vehicle for an uncertain pursuit. Throughout her long dark life Veronica dreaded and yet longed for love, only in dreams did it sometimes turn out as she wished. Powerful and plodding as they are, actual occurrences slip away and yet seem to seep inside; they hurt, but like something you do to yourself; they mortify, but just barely: mortification flies off like a restless cloud and nobody else notices; mortification dissipates like the rapture of a dark cloud…She kept wavering between Johannes and Demeter…And dreams do not reside inside the self, nor are they fragments of reality, they carve out their own nook in a burst of complete feeling, and that’s where they reside, hovering, weightless, like a liquid seeping out. That’s how you give yourself to a beloved in dreams, like a liquid seeping out; with an altered sense of space; for the waking soul is a bottomless hollow, billowing up against reality in undulating bubbles of ice.”
“Then she fancied that she might just as well belong to another, and it did not feel to her like infidelity, but rather like a last betrothal somewhere other than where they were, a realm where they only resembled music, where they embodied notes heard by no one reverberating against nothing. It was then that she felt her being as nothing but a grinding line that dug her under so as to hear itself singing in the tangled silence, in a state in which one moment demands the next and she became what she did – inexorably and inconsequentially – and yet there were certain things that she never dared do. And while it suddenly seemed to her as if it might well be that they only really loved each other in their refusal to acknowledge the clang of that one, quiet, almost maddeningly intimate sound, she suddenly fathomed the deeper entanglements and immense convolutions in the pauses in between, the mute moments of awakening from the swell into the limitless expanse, to face and feel the unconscious onslaught of life; and with the solitary pain of sinking into the maelstrom side by side – compared to which all other actions amounted to nothing more than a noisy benumbing, sleep-inducing narcotic – she loved him even as she contemplated how to hurt him in the worst way possible.
For weeks her love held to this murky hue; then it passed. But oftentimes it returned in muffled tremors, particularly when she sensed the proximity of another. An offhand remark from an indifferent person sufficed to make her feel needled by the stranger’s gazed…stunned…thinking, why are you still here? She never actually craved contact with these strange creatures; it was painful to think of them; the very thought of it disgusted her. But all at once she felt the oscillating, bodiless silence pressing in around her; and she no longer knew if she was rising or falling.”
“It grieved her to gaze at this agitation, in the wake of which her feelings had been left behind. This life that just moments before was still flowing through her, transformed into feeling, she still saw it out there, suffused with itself and in its own giddy grip, but as soon as she tried to bring it closer the whole thing crumbled and fell apart. Repulsive now, it drilled into her eyes, as if her soul were dangling, prone, in its path, stretched and taut, reaching for something, grasping at the void…
And all of a sudden it struck her that she too – just like all that she glimpsed out the window – was trapped in herself and bound to live out her life in one place, in one particular city, in a house, in an apartment, consumed by a single sense of self, to dwell for years in that minuscule enclosure, and then it seemed to her, were she to stop and wait for the blink of an eye, as if all her happiness could pull
away like that clutter of clamorous things.
But this didn’t just strike her as a random thought, there was something in it of that boundless barren expanse in which her feelings sought in vain to gain a foothold, and something took a quiet hold of her like a rock climber hugging the escarpment, and then came an icy cold, quiet moment in which she heard the sound of self, a faint, incomprehensible creak in the vast expanse of creation, and in the sudden silence that followed she fathomed how quietly we trickle away, and in contrast how vast and fraught with terrible forgotten sounds is the stony brow of nothingness.”
“Then she thought to herself: People like us could perhaps even live with people like that…It gave her a strangely needling rush, a lingering brain twitch, covered by something like a thin pane of glass, against which her thoughts were painfully pressed, only to gape with an uncertain distress into the great beyond; it pleased her all the while, boldly and above suspicion, to look people in the eye. Then she tried to imagine herself estranged from her husband, as she might be perceived by strangers. She managed to quietly conjure him up; he remained a wonderful, incomparable person, but having forfeited the imponderable, a certain something her mind could not wrap itself around, he appeared pale and not that close; sometimes just prior to the onset of an illness you see the world with just such a cool, distant clarity. But then it struck her how strange it was that she should once have really experienced something of the sort she now toyed with, that there was a time when she would definitely have viewed her husband in this distant way as she now tried to do, without even giving it a second thought, and the entire situation suddenly seemed odd to her.
Every day you go walking among particular people or through a landscape, a city, past a certain house, and this landscape or these people always accompany you every step of the way, they’re just there without wanting to be, day in, day out. But then all at once, they suddenly stop dead in their tracks with a start and just stand there incomprehensibly stiff and still, detached, in the grip of a strange, stubborn feeling. And when you look back at yourself there’s a stranger standing there among them. Then there’s the past. But what is that? Claudine asked herself, and looking up again, she was suddenly unable to say just what it was that might be different from before.
At that moment she also knew that nothing is simpler than to acknowledge that it is you yourself who has changed, and yet she began to feel a curious reluctance to accept this truth; and maybe, she pondered, we only really grasp the big, decisive connections in curiously inverted retrospect, whereas moments later she no longer fathomed the ease of her present estrangement from a past that was once as close as her own skin, and it seemed inconceivable that there might once have been anything other than the present, then she remembered how when a person sees something peculiar-looking in the distance, and then walks over, and at a certain point it enters the sphere of the familiar, but the spot where one stood before is now
somehow meaningless; one only needs to imagine that yesterday I did this or that: any second is always like an abyss before which a sick, pallid man hesitates, a body just doesn’t think about it – and all of a sudden in a lightning flash her entire life seemed to be riddled by this incomprehensible, unending infidelity, by which, while remaining the same for everyone else, one instantaneously separates from oneself without knowing why, all the while nevertheless sensing in it a last, never depleted tenderness beyond conscious reach, in the throes of which, more than with anything else, the person you are feels completely in touch with himself.”
“When she and the man met up again, it no longer felt like they’d just gotten acquainted, but rather like the prelude to the start of something between them. She knew that in the meantime he, too, had thought of her and had put together a plan of action. She heard him say: ‘I understand why you rebuffed my advances, but never will anyone adore you as selflessly as I do.’ Claudine made no reply. His words were spoken slowly, emphatically; she felt their effect, if indeed they were realized.
Then she said: ‘Do you know for a fact that we are really snowed in?’ It all seemed to her as if she had already experienced it; her words seemed to get stuck in the tracks of words she must already have uttered some time before. She did not remain mindful of what she did, but rather of the tenuous difference between her present actions and something similar that happened in the past; the same capricious, come-what-may soupçon of what lay ahead. And she had a powerful, dispassionate intimation of herself, like little waves rolling again and again over the past and present.
After a while the undersecretary suddenly said: ‘I can sense that something in you is hesitating. I know that hesitation. Every woman faces it at some point in her life. You cherish your husband and no doubt don’t want to hurt him and therefore close yourself off. But as you must know, there are moments in life when you’ve got to let go to give free rein to the great storm of emotion.’
Again Claudine said nothing. She sensed how he must misconstrue her silence, but she found the ambiguity strangely beguiling. That there was something in her that did not translate and so remained immune to the effect of her actions, something for which she could make no excuses, since it lay beneath the reach of words, something
which in order to be fathomed had to be loved, as it loved itself, something she shared only with her husband – this she felt all the more poignantly in her silence; it was the consummation of an intimate tie with him deep inside herself, while surrendering her superfluous self to this stranger who shamelessly mishandled her.”
“She felt so sorry for herself, all the while weighed down by a humming dread that all this could be happening again. The undersecretary said: ‘I can tell by looking at you that you are one of those women destined to be swept away by a storm of emotions. You are proud and want to hide it; but believe me, a connoisseur of the female soul can see right through your façade of resistance.’ It was as if without skipping a heartbeat she sank back into her past. But when she looked around her she felt a certain randomness in this sinking into the sea of the soul, like currents of time stacked one on top of another, a randomness not in the appearance of the things around her, but rather in that this appearance held fast, as if inseparable from the thing itself, unnaturally clawed into the skin of the moment, like a fleeting feeling that refuses to let go of a face. And strange as it may seem, it was as if, a link having broken in the quiet course of occurrence, disturbing the ordinary succession of things and sending them flying out of lock step, little by little all faces and things congealed into a sudden, haphazard composite expression that cut obliquely across the apparent chaos, imposing a new order. And she alone slipped with faltering unfurled senses between these faces and things – downwards – into the deep.
For a moment, the great painstakingly plated emotional braid of her being became apparent, fluttering in the distance, like a pallid, practically worthless backdrop to reality. She thought to herself, you draw a line in the sand, any old unbroken line, just to have something to hold onto in the swarm of silently looming things; that is the stuff of our life; like when you keep speaking nonstop, pretending that each word is somehow ineluctably linked to the one before and automatically generates the next, because you fear the moment you allow silence to strip off the pretense of continuity the flimsy construct of self will falter in some unimaginable way and be dissolved by silence; but it is only your fear, your frailty before the terrible, gaping randomness of it all.”
“And then it struck her in a secret corner of her heart: somewhere among these people lives a person, someone who doesn’t fit in, someone else, someone to whom the others might have grown accustomed, and no one will ever have an inkling of the self you are today. Since feelings only exist in a long chain of other feelings, linked to each other, all that matters is that one moment in life be linked without a gap to another, and there are a hundred ways this might happen. And then for the first time since falling in love she was struck by the thought: it’s all a matter of happenstance; by some coincidence it became a reality and then you hold on tight. And for the first time she sounded her emotional depths, and felt this last hold, this root, this disturbance of the absolute, this faceless feeling of herself enveloped in her love, a feeling to which she had always in the past lay claim, and that had made her the same as everyone else.
And then it was as if she had to let herself sink back into the elemental, into the unrealized, nowhere at home, and she ran through the sadness of the empty streets and peered into the windows of the houses, wanting no other company than the clip clop of her heels on the cobble stones, just to hear herself running, reduced to a mere living entity, the sound sometimes leading, sometimes lagging behind.”
“She said: ‘I have only the vaguest idea of what we could be for each other. We are still afraid of each other, sometimes when you speak even you seem as hard and unforgiving as a stone striking out at me: but what I mean is a way in which we can completely meld into the mix of being two, and not stand by like a stranger and listen…I don’t know how to explain it…what you sometimes call God is so…’
Then she said things that bewildered Johannes: ‘He whom you really ought to mean is nowhere present because he is in everything. He is a fat, nasty woman who forces me to kiss her breasts, and at the same time He is me myself, who sometimes, when she’s alone, lays herself flat on the floor in front of a cupboard and thinks things like this. And maybe you’re just like that; you’re sometimes so impersonal and withdrawn from the world like a candle in the dark nothing in itself, but just a thing that makes the darkness greater and more visible. Ever since that time I saw you shrink back in fear, it sometimes seems as if you’d vanished from my consciousness and all that remains is fear, a dark speck, and then a warm, soft rim around it. And what it really comes down to is that you’re like the action itself and not the person engaged in it; we have to be alone with what happens, and at the same time together, silent and closed off like the inside of the four windowless walls of a room in which anything could happen, and yet just like that, without cutting into one another, as if it were all only happening in our thoughts…’
And Johannes did not understand.
Whereupon a change suddenly came over her, like something sinking back into itself, even the lines of her face grew finer in parts, and elsewhere more pronounced; she still might have had something more on the tip of her tongue, but no longer appeared to be the same person who had just spoken, and her words now came out haltingly, as if stumbling on a wide, unfamiliar pathway, ‘What are you thinking?…No man I know could possibly be so impersonal, only an animal could be like that…Help me please…for heaven’s sake, why does an animal always come to mind when I try to talk about it?’
And Johannes tried somehow to bring her back to her senses, all at once he spoke up, he wanted to keep listening.
But she just shook her head.
From then on Johannes felt a terrible ease knowing that he was reaching past what he really wanted by a hair’s breadth. Sometimes you can’t say just what it is that you darkly crave, but you know that it is going to slip through your fingers; you then live out the rest of your life as if in a locked room afraid to leave. It sometimes worried him that he might suddenly feel the uncontrollable urge to burst out
whimpering and get down on his hands and knees and sniff at Veronica’s hair; such notions crossed his mind. But nothing happened.”
“Children and the dead have no soul; but the soul of the living is that element of self that does not let you love, much as you’re so inclined, that stubborn residue that stands in the way of all love – Veronica felt that this one unshakable constant, immune to amorous lures, is the focal point of all feeling, clinging fearfully, a private precinct forever out of reach of the dearly beloved, beckoning from afar; and even if you draw near, it keeps its distance, smiling back, as if waiting for a secret rendezvous. But children and the dead, they are either nothing yet or nothing more, giving us to believe that everything lies ahead or everything lies behind; they are like the hollowed vessels that give shape to dreams. Children and the dead have no soul, no soul to speak of. And animals. Veronica found animals terrifying in the threat of their ugly onslaught, but their piercing pupils dripped with dumb droplets of forgetting.
Soul is something of the sort, a vehicle for an uncertain pursuit. Throughout her long dark life Veronica dreaded and yet longed for love, only in dreams did it sometimes turn out as she wished. Powerful and plodding as they are, actual occurrences slip away and yet seem to seep inside; they hurt, but like something you do to yourself; they mortify, but just barely: mortification flies off like a restless cloud and nobody else notices; mortification dissipates like the rapture of a dark cloud…She kept wavering between Johannes and Demeter…And dreams do not reside inside the self, nor are they fragments of reality, they carve out their own nook in a burst of complete feeling, and that’s where they reside, hovering, weightless, like a liquid seeping out. That’s how you give yourself to a beloved in dreams, like a liquid seeping out; with an altered sense of space; for the waking soul is a bottomless hollow, billowing up against reality in undulating bubbles of ice.”
March 16, 2015
3... ma forse anche 4...ma forse anche 5...
10 giorni per leggere 136 pagine. Troppo intense, troppo impegnative. Troppo vere. Troppo precise nelle descrizioni astratte. Da pazzi negare che la scrittura di Musil sia brutta, ma sicuramente non è un libro-passatempo.
Da rileggere.
All'improvviso le parve che tutta la sua vita fosse dominata da quel continuo, incredibile tradimento con cui ci si scioglie ogni istante da se stessi, quando per gli altri si rimane identici. [...] così le parve di stare tra quella gente solo con una parte insensibile di se stessa, con i capelli o le unghie o come se fosse fatta di corno. Rispose in qualche modo, con l'impressione che quanto diceva si s'impigliasse in un sacco o in una rete; le sue stesse parole le sembravano estranee tra altre parole estranee.
10 giorni per leggere 136 pagine. Troppo intense, troppo impegnative. Troppo vere. Troppo precise nelle descrizioni astratte. Da pazzi negare che la scrittura di Musil sia brutta, ma sicuramente non è un libro-passatempo.
Da rileggere.
All'improvviso le parve che tutta la sua vita fosse dominata da quel continuo, incredibile tradimento con cui ci si scioglie ogni istante da se stessi, quando per gli altri si rimane identici. [...] così le parve di stare tra quella gente solo con una parte insensibile di se stessa, con i capelli o le unghie o come se fosse fatta di corno. Rispose in qualche modo, con l'impressione che quanto diceva si s'impigliasse in un sacco o in una rete; le sue stesse parole le sembravano estranee tra altre parole estranee.
July 12, 2019
I found this book pretty much unreadable. Long, convoluted sentences, impressionistic prose, stream-of-consciousness pretension. Two novellas loosely linked by being about two women facing choices about love and sex, but otherwise not really being about anything except their tedious inner thoughts. Apparently even Musil didn’t think the two novellas were a success. I don’t mind working hard at a book but the reward must be worth the effort and in this case it wasn’t. I cared nothing for the two women portrayed and was merely irritated by the style. Thumbs down for me.
November 11, 2018
There's modernism, and there's pretentiousness. This is the latter, or so it felt to me – people saying and thinking things that only deserve the ignominy of Pseuds' Corner. It might be fine for some higher minds than my own, but I didn't take to this at all.
March 21, 2019
My first experience with this author, and it was worth it. A difficult book to read and keep track, nonetheless is filled with meaning and an innovative style. It sure made me want to grab is more acclaimed book, and see what fruits this experiment of a book bore.
March 1, 2024
musil’le net bir problemim var ama asla çözemiyorum be merkez.
February 11, 2024
Yüz sayfalık kısalığına rağmen günlerce bitiremediğim; iki öyküden oluşan hileli, bunalımlı bir kitap. İçimizdeki tarif etmesi zor, yarım yamalak duyguları, bazen dile getirilemez isteklerin tasvirini kadın karakterler üzerinden deneyen iki öykü bu; ağdalı, karmaşık, cazip fakat sindirmesi zor.
İlk hikayede yalnız çıktığı bir yolculukta sevdiği eşini aldatma fikri içine düşen bir kadın var. Saklı kalabilecek bir cinsel heyecan yaşama, benliğini bulma, gençliğine dönme gibi arzuları zina olasılığının getirdiği duygusal yükle yaşıyor. İkinci öykü ise iki erkek arasında kalmış bir kadını anlatıyor, bu öyküdeki varoluşsal boşluk ve iç sıkıntısı kaldırmakta zorlandığım bir yürek burgusuna dönüştü.
“Bazı şeyler bilincin ufkunun ötesindedir.” Anlaması zor, puan vermesi zor yüz sayfa. Modernizmin şah babası bir eser. Sadece cesareti olanlara.
İlk hikayede yalnız çıktığı bir yolculukta sevdiği eşini aldatma fikri içine düşen bir kadın var. Saklı kalabilecek bir cinsel heyecan yaşama, benliğini bulma, gençliğine dönme gibi arzuları zina olasılığının getirdiği duygusal yükle yaşıyor. İkinci öykü ise iki erkek arasında kalmış bir kadını anlatıyor, bu öyküdeki varoluşsal boşluk ve iç sıkıntısı kaldırmakta zorlandığım bir yürek burgusuna dönüştü.
“Bazı şeyler bilincin ufkunun ötesindedir.” Anlaması zor, puan vermesi zor yüz sayfa. Modernizmin şah babası bir eser. Sadece cesareti olanlara.
July 12, 2025
Tre storie/non-storie dove i fatti sono rarissimi e il discorso diretto (come pure quello indiretto) ancora più rari; “Congiungimenti” trasporta in una zona di linguaggio densissimo, a tratti fin troppo complesso, quasi opprimente, come devono esserlo le esperienze e i pensieri dei protagonisti (anzi delle protagoniste); l’esplorazione di Musil si spinge al punto di permettere al lettore di “sentire” i personaggi in maniera totale ed incondizionata e di ritrovarsi confuso ed affranto alla fine del testo.
December 12, 2017
Ja neviem, asi som na to ešte nedorástla alebo niečo, ale vôbec som nedokázala zachytiť ani pomenovať pocity, s ktorými sa hrdinky stretávali. Nedávali mi zmysel, boli premenlivé, stále niečo chceli a zároveň nechceli nič, nakoniec som z toho mala pocit, že len vkuse pre niečo mrnčia. Navyše siahodlhé súvetia, jedno na druhom.
Veľmi som sa s touto knihou bila, možno sa k nej vrátim o pár rokov a zmením názor.
Veľmi som sa s touto knihou bila, možno sa k nej vrátim o pár rokov a zmením názor.
July 12, 2021
Un libro estremamente lento ed estremamente denso. Il linguaggio è ostico, ma piacevole, poetico, e le metafore sono le vere protagoniste. Non c'è alcuna differenza tra elementi essenziali ed elementi inessenziali: ogni dettaglio è essenziale e quindi ogni dettaglio è nello stesso tempo inessenziale, ottenendo una totalità indeterminata che non ammette possibilità di scelta. In parole semplici: Musil, anche meno dai!
November 8, 2021
Knjiga ili, bolje rečeno, obje priče su protkane finim erotskim notama. Mjestimično, pisac bi toliko odlutao u svoje misli da bi ga bilo teško pratiti i pohvatati bez poznavanja barem osnova psihologije ličnosti.
January 16, 2019
Ich habe es für ein Seminar lesen müssen...der Schreibtstil und die Erzählung ist etwas verwirrend und ungewohnt. Nicht das beste Werk von Musil, meiner Meinung nach.
November 29, 2019
Die Vollendung der Liebe 5/5
Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika 3/5
Die Versuchung der stillen Veronika 3/5
June 14, 2021
Two early experimental novellas. Although Musil never emulated this style again it is clear that the approach of language as guage to the pyschological held through all of his later writings
Read
May 29, 2022DNF second one, honestly this is a weird book
March 17, 2025
Tengo que decir que no pasé las 35 páginas pero quería dejar aquí marcado que no me gustó para no olbidarme de no intenar leerlo de nuevo.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews