Making us uestion all our assumptions about society: The Sleepwalkers

On the surface, part one of Hermann Broch's trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1938) is a conventoinal story about a conventional guy, Joachim, a German military officer, who is torn between two women, the bar girl Rozena and the genteel and virginal Elisabeth, and also torn between his friendship and rivalry with businessman-pal Bertrand (who we learn is also in love with Elisabether but, unbeknownst to Joachim, sacrifices his love and heads off to India to leave the field clear for J.) and his father the Baron von Kasenow who is at once a tyrtant, a libertine, and a social snob, angry at his son for not coming back to run the estate (after death of brother in a duel of honor) and marry the wealthy Elisabeth. In other words, it could be a hit movie of a TV drama, based simply on the superficial elements of plot - but plot is not what makes The Sleepwalkers so strange and perhaps profound: first of all, the father is no ordinary domineering man but a figure like the evil and terrifying father in many Kafka novels and stories, and his odd behavior, beginning in first chapter when Broch devotes pages to describing his imperious way of strutting down the street to the last chapters in which the father goes insane before our eyes and screams at J. and retreats to a room and tries to rewrite his will disinheriting J., pressing so hard on the paper that his quill pen burst and spurts ink. Hm. And then there's Joachim, who again seems a conventional hero of a bildungsroman on the surface but Broch takes us right into his mind where we see some very disturbing thoughts and images, notably his perceptions of the beautiful Elisabeth: at one time he sees her entire head as emanating from her throat, snakelike; at another he sees her face as a "landscape" and imagines images of her nose projected onto the wall as the silhouette of a mountain range. He is, and we are, deeply disturbed by these images - some kind of sexual loathing - but he moves forward with his plan to marry Elisabeth. The next to last chapter is the scene of their wedding night, which, as you can imagine, is not consummated - and the last chapter is one paragraph, stating that they had their first child 18 months later - so this disturbing relationship, on both parts (E. confessed to Bertrand that she did not love J., but she will marry him anyway) is to all outside eyes completely ordinary, making us question everything about the foundations of our culture. Some great scenes especially in the second half, notably Rozen's "accidental" shooting of Bertrand, Joachim's search in the bars of the city for Rozena, whom he finds cowering and filthy in a ladies' room, the complete mental breakdown of van Pasenow. A very unconventional work, and we'll see how it plays off against the next two parts of the trilogy.