Las tribulaciones del estudiante Torless by Robert Musil

week six.
I was excited about reading my first Robert Musil. I've had this book for two years shelved waiting for the right moment to read it.
As part of this exercise, the book didn't live up to the expectations. I really enjoyed Musil's prose and his style is in the same universe of Kundera, but its far away from Kundera's brilliance.
These are some of the parts that made me stop and think.

violenta nostalgia.
I had never considered nostalgia being associated to any other feeling. Musil is paying attention to detail as we saw in a previous book about writing.

Preparar el alma, en espera de algo, y ese algo es del todo incierto. todo es asi, un eterno esperar, de lo cual solo sabemos que hay que esperarlo.
And isn't this the whole point of creating expectations; that we await for something with no guarantee that it will ever happen, and the wait in itself becomes the life we live, a sequence of moments with uncertain rewards.

caracter insuperablemente incomprensible.
las cosas accesibles a la inteligencia, y sin embrago no puedes aprehenderlas con las palabras o el pensamiento. Una linea que como el horizonte, retrocedia a medida que se le acerca.

hate against each other.
Interesting choice of words when talking about teens falling in love. The first passion teens feel is not love for each other, but hate against each other. Because the feelings are not understood at this age, to be two is actually nothing else but loneliness times two.
This first passion is short and leaves a bitter taste. The encounter was fortuitous, and after the breakup, the passions don't know each other, and only notice the distance between them, never what brought them together.

dureza.
in mankind the toughness is our character, in the consciousnesses that we are human, and the responsibility that carries to know that we are part of this world. if a men losses this conscience, losses himself, and when he losses that which made him unique, losses its virtue.

manzana.
when we see an apple, we see vibrations on our eyes of light, and when we reach out to get it, our muscles and nerves move our hand to touch the apple. But between the hand and the apple there is much more, an immortal soul that once sinned.

During a chapter in the book, Torless questions mathematics and the utility of some of its formulas and concepts. His teacher explains that he needs more time, to be more mature to really understand mathematics... and until then, just believe.
It made me think about the difference between faith and belief.
To belief is to consider something uncertain as probable. To have faith is to accept the uncertainty of something probable.

Overall I found interesting some of the thoughts but what the book made me realized is that yuo can have a very good technique that makes you enjoy the reading, but the story needs to be engaging too.
I didn't like the story, didn't sympathized with the characters and I didn't understand their motivations.
At the end, I think that this is one of the best written books I read, but one of the weakest stories too.

Another good lesson to be treasured.