Word: musil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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While doing chorus work and singing commercials in New York, Eddie married Helene Musil, a ballet dancer, and followed her to Paris. There she made a success while he spun in the same old luckless groove...
YOUNG TÖRLESS, by Robert Musil (217 pp.; Pantheon; $2.95), helps explain one of history's more interesting paradoxes: how a civilization outwardly, as gay and waltzy as 19th century Austria could produce the stark theories and dark case histories of Vienna's Dr. Sigmund Freud. Austria's late Novelist Robert Musil, known in the U.S. for his ponderously brilliant masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (TIME, June 8, 1953; Nov. 15, 1954), had a sharp eye for the moral decay behind Vienna's comfy façades. His first novel, brought...
...rless' friends-a young baron who is a Storm Trooper in embryo-all this is philosophical proof "that merely being human means nothing." Author Musil is at pains to suggest that such dark impulses sprouting from the confusions of youth are part of growing up. Like a nightmare, the whole perverted episode has not really damaged young Törless-or has it? The boy had briefly "lost his sense of direction [but] an indefinable hidden disgust never quite left him . . ." Readers of this odd but provocative book may wonder whether this sentence does not apply to Old Europe...
...Author Musil clearly suffered from the disease of writing. Fortunately, he also had the medicine of thought...
...celebrate the Austro-Hungarian Emperor's 70th jubilee. The campaign grinds along like a slow bus to nowhere. Committees beget committees, pressure groups stall each other in what one critic described as the dance of rainmakers who have lost their magic. The ruling class sketched by Author Musil has lost not only its magic, but its faith in God, its fear of the Devil and its confidence in itself. It has opinions but no convictions, techniques but no principles, ideals but no beliefs. In short, its troubles may be more timely than at first appears. Author Musil...