One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features: The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil
Published by: Penguin Modern Classic
ISBN: 0142180009
Price: £7.99

To name something is to put a handle on it - and we approach objects with handles very differently to those without.

Paradoxically, if a physical object has a handle, we are less likely to handle it; we will pick it up formally, following the etiquette its handled form suggests to us. We use the cup to drink from, the bell to ring, the light fitting to decorate.

The same is true of names: once the handle has been attached to the object or area of concept, we are far less likely to explore the thing (the thingness of the thing, as philosophy would put it). Instead, we will either employ it or we will briefly examine it - looking, like an antique dealer, for the potter's pictogram, the silver mark, the price sticker.

I would like to be able to write about The Confusions of Young Törless without putting any handles upon it at all. (Please, if you do intend to read this fantastic novel, don't even glance at the blurb on the back or the introduction by J.M.Coetzee. Not before you've finished.) There are at least a dozen ways in which Törless could be reduced, and all of these handles are likely to make your exploration of the book less worthwhile.

To be honest, I would like to be able to write about Törless without writing about it; I would like just to quote passage after passage - I would like to quote, unbrokenly, from first to last page - ideally, I would like to have you read the book and then us meet up and talk about it afterwards, drunk, at the end of the evening, in a warm, dark, smoky room.

But as we can't do that, alas, I will have to give you some background before I begin quoting. Törless is a pupil at an exclusive seminary for boys 'in an eastern part of the Empire' (Austro-Hungarian), close to but not actually in Russia. We are never told his exact age, but 'the first signs of sexual maturity were beginning, slowly and darkly, to well up within him'. He does not have friends as such; the two boys he associates with are Reitling, a malicious type who reveres Napoleon, and Beineberg, who has inherited from his father, once stationed in India, the 'bizarre and mysterious half-sleep of esoteric Buddhism'. A Machiavel, then, and a mystic.

Towards the end of the book, we read of Törless: 'He felt... a passionate longing to leave behind those confused, troubling relationships; he had a longing for silence, for books. As though his soul was black earth, beneath which the seeds are stirring, and no one knows how they will break forth. The image of a gardener occurred to him, watering his flower-beds each morning, with even, expectant care. That image wouldn't let him go, its expectant certainty seemed to attract all this yearning to itself.'

There is a great deal of confusion in this passage, though it is not itself confused; it is very clear, despite its complexity. The first sentence describes Törless's mood. The second finds a metaphor for this. But in the third sentence, Törless seems to overhear the narrator's voice and to elaborate from a point already reached. And in the final sentence, he himself becomes powerless, under the sway of the image that expresses his mood. A circle (the book is full of circles just as it is full of parallel lines which meet in infinity) - a circle is completed.

With this kind of writing, Musil was trying to avoid simplistic handles. His objects are never stable, they are constantly and confusedly metamorphosing into something else. The mood becomes the earth becomes the gardener becomes the cultivated image of the mood. Perhaps not a circle, then - perhaps an ascending or descending spiral.

My opening words about handles are partly a gloss on the epigraph the young Musil (twenty-five years old when he finished Törless) chose for his novel:

'As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.'

- Maeterlink

Whilst writing about Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, I mentioned how he and his other contemporary Robert Walser, author of Jakob von Gunten, were pursuing a literary, non-Freudian form of psychoanalysis. Robert Musil, I think, comes closest to expressing this:

'Yes, there are dead and living thoughts. The sort of thinking which moves on the illuminated surface, which can be checked at any point along the thread of causality, does not need to be the living kind. A thought that one encounters along that path remains indifferent, like a man chosen at random from within a column of marching soldiers. A thought - it may have passed through our brain long ago - comes to life only at the moment when it is joined by something that is no longer thought, no longer logical, so that we feel its truth beyond all justification, like an anchor tearing from it into blood-filled, living flesh? Any great realization is only half completed in the brain's pool of light; the other half is formed in the dark soil of our innermost being, and above it is a state of the soul on whose furthest tip the thought sits perched, like a flower.'

And Törless goes even further than this:

'There is something dark in me, something among all my thoughts, something that I cannot measure with thoughts, a life that can't be expressed in words and which is none the less my life...'