Book, Unions: the perfection of love / the temptation of the quiet Veronica[LS]

UNIÕES, which Perspectiva publishes in its Paralelos collection, brings together two little-known and very intriguing stories by the author of The Man Without Qualities. In other hands, 'The Perfection of Love' and 'The Temptation of Quiet Veronica' would certainly have received treatment more in line with tradition. Robert Musil, however, is part of a select group of writers, including Joyce, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Proust and Faulkner, who, as highlighted by Muniz Sodré, broke with social language to 'suggest another reality,' of the character's consciousness'. Thus, Musil denies his reader the rational plot that elucidates the symptoms caused by the sexual traumas that Claudine and Verônica experienced in childhood, their early erotic fantasies, the concerns and anxieties that prevent their love fulfillment. Rather, the narrative focuses on the subjectivity and intimate experience of the two women - in a style that Clarice Lispector would later make her own. Rowing against literary voyeurism and onsumism, Musil puts into action an entirely new expressive form, as he himself says in his diary, - an emotional sequence, a sequence of atmospheres, from which arises, at the limit, the appearance of a causal connection - , sequences and appearances under which the great artist's pen outlines the shadow of a disruptive eroticism.