Just finished reading "Young Törless" by Robert Musil. Mainly because Milan Kundera wrote about him in a book of essays about the novel and classical music, and I just semi-finished reading that. The back of my Penguin edition of this book calls Musil the Proust of pre-war Central Europe.

Every so often I will complain about a book because I feel like the writer is trying to explore one of the great mysteries of life and the soul, but ends up resolving the mystery via sex or murder. If you ever have the feeling that something creepy is going on, I mean really, most of the time it's because you're living in an entirely different and separate world from everyone you know, even from those you love, and this world might not even be real, and you might not have a soul, and you'll never truly see or know yourself. Those are the fucking myteries. And then J.P. Ballard or whoever resolves this creepy feeling by saying it's from a sex cult. Well! This book just never went that way. I adored it and I felt like I was accomplishing something by reading it. It really was the same feeling I got from reading Proust.