‘Intimate Ties’ by Robert Musil   (1911) – 206 pages                     Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman

In my continuing quest to read more fiction by the German writer Robert Musil who wrote one of the most brilliant long novels of the twentieth century, ‘The Man Without Qualities’, I stumbled upon this short work called ‘Intimate Ties’ consisting of two novellas. A short work by Robert Musil – what more could I ask for? His short novella ‘The Young Torless’ is also excellent, and I was hoping for another one of that caliber.

It turns out I should have done some more research on ‘Intimate Ties’ before diving into it. What did the critics say of it?

Michael Hoffman dismisses the entire work.

“Intimate Ties is one of those regrettable publications that hurts the reputations of everyone connected with it: Musil’s own, the translator’s, and even the luckless publisher, Archipelago. The novellas themselves are very strange: very slow, very interior, minutely analytical, and revolving around frankly pornographic subjects: being sodomized by a stranger in “The Culmination of Love,” a childhood recollection of bestiality in “The Temptation of Silent Veronica.” But we are not talking Anaïs Nin here. Musil’s overall effect is about as untitillating as the contemporary paintings of Gustav Klimt (themselves described as so unerotic, they were an argument for chastity), and indeed the author might have set himself the challenge or exercise of rendering such material opaque, decorative, somehow theoretical. His lens is so thickly smeared with verbal Vaseline that if there is any “action,” the reader can barely follow it.” – Musil’s Infinities, Michael Hoffman, NYBR

“One might describe Intimate Ties as weird, finical, oversubtle, probably misconceived, and in the end barely readable, one of the stranger and chillier blind alleys in literature. It is also shockingly badly translated. This is the more upsetting as Peter Wortsman is not a beginner but an experienced operator. (He has even translated a book of Musil’s before: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, back in 1987.)” – Musil’s Infinities, Michael Hoffman, NYBR

While the critic Hoffman dismisses the entire work, J. M. Coetzee only dismisses the second novella and finds much to like in the first novella, ‘The Culmination of Love’.

“Musil’s later attitude toward this story—which appeared in company with the much inferior “The Temptation of Quiet Veronica” in 1911—is an interesting one: though it remained the only one of his works he could bear to reread, he dissuaded friends from venturing upon it. It was so obscure he said, so much a matter of “the artist’s arcana,” that the ordinary reader was all too likely to respond with “revulsion.” – On the Edge of Revelation, J. M. Coetzee, NYBR

I totally agree with Coetzee’s attitude toward both novellas. The second is much inferior, and I will dismiss it from further consideration. However I do agree with Coetzee that the first novella has considerable merit. It is written from the point of view of the young married woman Claudine.

“She loved him, even as she contemplated how to hurt him in the worst way possible.”

Claudine is traveling by train to visit her 13 year-old daughter whom she had before she met her husband. She starts remembering that time before she was married. In her early days, she remained “under the sway of any men who crossed her path, for whom she was then prepared, to the point of self-sacrifice and a complete abandonment of will, to do anything they asked of her”.

After she met her husband, that all changed.

“All she had done and suffered in the past was repressed the moment she met her present husband. From then on, she lived a life of quiet and solitude.”

However this train trip is bringing her previous life back to her. There is a sales man sitting across from her who is giving her the eye.

“And suddenly she felt a dark longing for her life before, that time of mistreatment and exploitation by strangers.”

There is a snowstorm, and the passengers on the train are snowed in at a small hotel for several days.

The translation of the first novella is just clear enough for the reader to follow and the translation of the second novella is near incomprehensible.

Grades :

First novella : ‘The Culmination of Love’ –      A-

Second novella : ‘The Temptation of Silent Veronica’ –      D