The Confusions of Young Törless
by Robert Musil, J. M. Coetzee
At a bleak, isolated military school on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, four young cadets - Torless, Beineberg, Reiting and their victim Basini - drift even further away from their school- fellows into a private world of ritual, secrecy and torture. First published in 1906.