Intimate Ties

I do love stumbling across weird and wonderful books, and Intimate Ties is certainly one of the most unusual I have read in quite a while! A pairing of two novellas which are basically linked by each focussing on a single female protagonist as she agonises over a deep emotional decision. In 'The Culmination of Love' Claudine journeys away from her husband in order to visit her daughter at a boarding school. Finding herself soon snowed in when she gets there, Claudine is tempted by the thought of a brief liaison with a fellow traveller. In 'The Temptation of Silent Veronica', the eponymous Veronica must decide between two potential suitors and the one she sends away is intending to row to the centre of a lake in order to kill himself. It's all cheery stuff! (It's really not!)

Vereinigungen (retitled as Intimate Ties for this English translation) was an experiment for Musil, one which I think he loved but which was not received well on its original publication. Despite the intense labour of love undertaken by Wortsman in rendering the two novellas in English, they are still probably more of curiosities now than works to suddenly find their place and time. That said, I loved the first novella, The Culmination Of Love! I thought the dense stream-of-consciousness style perfectly suited Claudine's predicament and the tiny details of description are divine: 'the light striking the wall congealed into golden lace' for example. This is very much a story for introverts and those of us who overthink everything. Musil takes three pages over an initial stilted conversation of no more than a half dozen sentences. Most readers, I am sure, will have tossed the book aside before Claudine even managed to get a cup of tea poured! Personally, however, I was absolutely hooked. The story feels of its time - in a good way - and I am grateful to Archipelago for giving me the chance to read it.

The Temptation of Silent Veronica, the second novella, however, left me cold. I just didn't feel the magic here at all and I can't put my finger on why. Perhaps I should have left a gap between the stories instead of reading them back to back? I don't know. The writing style that gripped me before now felt overly convoluted and I had no empathy for Veronica. In fact for a lot of the time I wasn't even sure what was going on. Not that much was, of course. That's kinda the point!

So in conclusion, I can say that most of you reading this are unlikely to get anything out of reading Intimate Ties. Those of you who do tend to enjoy the same literary oddness as me might just love The Culmination Of Love as much as I did. And, to anyone who 'got' The Temptation Of Silent Veronica, you have my admiration. Even after reading Wortsman's interesting and helpful essay on his translations, I am still baffled.