»As A Man Grows Older / The Confusions of Young Türless

In reading these two novels, I found myself immersed in the psychological turmoil of each book's protagonist.

Italo Svevo's As A Man Grows Older reflects some of the author's fascination with the exciting, contemporary field of pscyhoanalysis. The protagonist, a promising novelist himself, becomes infatuated and involved with a flirtatious woman. In Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Türless, the protagonist is a pubescent student at a boarding school, caught up in the machinations of both his peers and the school administrators. Both novels explore the dense world inside the minds of people in love, capturing the confusion and anxiety of this complicated sensation. I did not enjoy either book, though, for they were both too inwards-looking for my taste.