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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke, M.D. Herter Norton (Translator)

4.07 of 5 stars 4.07 · rating details · 2,163 ratings · 134 reviews

A masterly translation of one of the first great modernist novels by one of the German language's greatest poets, in which a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death within them and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables, h...more

Paperback, 238 pages

Published April 1st 1992 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 1910)

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Jun 26, 2009 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: ficciones, favorites, hearts-laid-bare, men-of-letters, shouldreread, unexpected

Rilke’s semiautobiographical surrogate Malte Laurids Brigge is a young Dane, a noble scion adrift in early twentieth century Paris, trying to become a poet. He corresponds rather well to Anthony Burgess’s description, in his charming study ReJoyce (1965), “of the type of student Stephen Daedelus represents, poor, treasuring old books with foxed leaves, independent, unwhining, deaf to political and social shibboleths, fanatically devoted to art and art only.” Malte and Stephen hang out at the Bib...more Rilke’s semiautobiographical surrogate Malte Laurids Brigge is a young Dane, a noble scion adrift in early twentieth century Paris, trying to become a poet. He corresponds rather well to Anthony Burgess’s description, in his charming study ReJoyce (1965), “of the type of student Stephen Daedelus represents, poor, treasuring old books with foxed leaves, independent, unwhining, deaf to political and social shibboleths, fanatically devoted to art and art only.” Malte and Stephen hang out at the Bibliotheque Nationale, worry about how incidents of shabbiness in their wardrobes may effect their dignity, and are nuts about Ibsen (or was that just Joyce himself? Did he lend that admiration of his to Stephen? I’m not near my bookshelves.) Malte doesn’t have anything like Stephen’s confidence in ultimate triumph—like the Camus and Sartre heroes for whom he is said to have provided a model, Malte is pushed pretty hard up against the wall by metaphysical doubts and a general terror before existence. But even so, they both have high-caliber minds that relish the lyrical-gnomic fragment and eschew exposition or transition (in the very best badass tradition of high modernist narration) in the telling of eerie tales from their unhappy childhoods (Malte’s mom is dead, too) and in excursions through their daunting hoards of philosophical and historical arcana (Stephen likes scholastic philosophy; Malte has a thing for famous female anchorites and fanatical mystic nuns, plus, and this is a big one for him, the deathbed agonies of medieval French kings as encountered in Froissart’s Chronicles); and Rilke is -- like Joyce, and like Baudelaire their mutual master in this respect -- profoundly attentive to the crushing squalor and pathos to be glimpsed in the “sinuous creases of old capital cities”:

Or that time in Naples: that young creature sat there opposite me in the street car and died. At first it looked like a fainting spell; we even drove on for a while. But then there was no doubt that we had to stop. And behind us vehicles halted and piled up, as though there would never be any more moving in that direction. The pale, stout girl might have quietly died like that, leaning against the woman beside her. But her mother would not allow this. She contrived all possible difficulties for her. She disordered her clothes and poured something into her mouth which could no longer retain anything. She rubbed her forehead with a liquid someone had brought, and when the eyes, at that, rolled back a little, she began to shake her to make her gaze come forward again. She shouted into those eyes that heard nothing, she pushed and pulled the whole thing to and fro like a doll, and finally she raised her arm and struck the puffy face with all her might, so that it should not die. That time I was afraid.

Rilke’s tableaux parisiens are as uncanny and disturbing as Baudelaire’s. He's as fascinated by the old, the worn-out, the thrown-away, the "girls, still unused in their innermost depths, who had never been loved" as the poet of “Les Sept Vieillards” and “Les Petites Vieilles.” On a blind newspaper peddler’s Sunday cravat and new straw hat: “He himself got no pleasure from them, and who among all these people (I looked about me) could imagine that all this finery was for them?” The wannabe Bohemian girls from good families Malte encounters copying in museums wear dresses that, without servants to button then all the way up, appear half open in the back. Beside him in one of the waiting rooms of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière, a last refuge of prostitutes and beggars, aged women and the insane, Malte becomes conscious of

a huge, immovable mass, having a face that I saw was empty, quite without features and without memories; and it was gruesome that the clothes were like that of a corpse dressed for a coffin. The narrow, black cravat had been buckled in the same loose, impersonal way around the collar, and the coat showed that it had been put on the will-less body by other hands. The hand had been placed on the trousers exactly where it lay, and even the hair looked as if it had been combed by those women who lay out the dead, and was stiffly arranged, like the hair of stuffed animals.

The portions of Malte's family memories and introspection are no less absorbing. Rilke's imagery is often so striking that even the deepest burrowing in Malte's malaise and artistic self-doubt can rival the lurid street scenes. "I put my little strength together like money." "...but inside you it preciptates, hardens, takes on pointed, geometrical forms between your organs." "...it was a literal, unambiguous tale that destroyed the teeming maggots of my conjectures." Certainly the weightiest book I've read this year. (less)

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Feb 03, 2013 Adam Floridia rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: discovered-thanks-to-goodreads, being-a-human

Sometimes choosing a star rating can be difficult. To avoid falling trap to such uncertainty, I try to stick as formally to the description as possible (ie: 1= “didn’t like,” 2= “it was ok,” 3=”liked it,” etc.). What gets really hairy, though, is when I have to reconcile “liked” with “appreciated,” which can be at odds and which happens occasionally with “literature.” This is made all the tougher when I already have it in my head that I should “like,” or at the very least “appreciate,” a book be...more Sometimes choosing a star rating can be difficult. To avoid falling trap to such uncertainty, I try to stick as formally to the description as possible (ie: 1= “didn’t like,” 2= “it was ok,” 3=”liked it,” etc.). What gets really hairy, though, is when I have to reconcile “liked” with “appreciated,” which can be at odds and which happens occasionally with “literature.” This is made all the tougher when I already have it in my head that I should “like,” or at the very least “appreciate,” a book because people whose opinions I respect think highly of it. That should really does get me and make me second guess my own opinion. I feel like “I don’t know how much of it I understood, but it was as if I were being solemnly promised that at some time I would understand it all” (150).

Thank goodness goodreads allows so much space for someone to move beyond a simplistic star rating and to give lengthy descriptions of the different aspects of the books that reached him (as well as provide rambling prefatory notes).
*
I didn’t like reading this. I never found myself anxiously awaiting the next time I could find time to pick it up and read more about Malte’s childhood reminiscences. I waded through his obscure historical asides, couldn’t keep any of the names straight, and just didn’t care. I actually cringed at certain passages which I thought were striving so hard to achieve profundity and reached odd at best. For example, when Malte “hit upon the idea of offering [the neighbor on the other side of the wall] my will. For one day I understood that his was at an end. And after that, whenever I felt it coming on, I stood on my side of the wall and begged him to make use of it. And as far as my expenditure of will was concerned, I began to feel it” (132). To me this reeks of a would-be poet attempting to emphasize how he feels things more deeply than the common man, when, in reality, he’s nuts and it makes no sense. Plus, that page is followed by a page of meditation on a box lid, “a lid [that] could have no other longing than to find itself on its box…the fulfillment of its desires” (134). He even decides “this box lid has it in for me.”
*
Then there are his ruminations on love, death, and God. All fodder for some very profound revelations. However, again I just couldn’t get into them—it’s the same problem I’ve always had with the Transcendentalists, and some of this sounded pretty transcendentalist-ish: “In the garden, there is one chief thing; everything is everywhere, and one would have to be in everything in order not to miss anything” (149). Malte is definitely trying to live deep and suck out the marrow of life, to separate himself from the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation.
*
HOWEVER, there were many passages that I did find profound, especially towards the beginning. (Maybe this just isn’t the type of book one can read a few pages at a time in ten minute bursts). In the beginning, I understand that Malte does represent the true Modern man: he is “learning to see” (3), discovering that “the main thing was that one was alive” (2), wondering “Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses…” (16), understanding that “something is going on in me as well, something that is beginning to distance and separate me from everything” (37). Talk about embodying the disillusionment, isolation, and true severing of ties with the past of the modernist movement (just read page 38 in its entirety and you’ve got a summary of said movement). There is sooo much talk about “masks” in the book, and I see that as a metaphor for Malte’s goal. He seeks to reveal the Truth to all of those around him, to rip away the false masks under which they live. Unfortunately, he is too awkward (especially around girls) and self-conscious and insecure. There were countless time throughout the text that I wrote in the margins “Prufrock!” In fact, as I read I had planned for this review to be a comparison between this book and the poem. Now I realize that I would have had to copy nearly the entire poem because comparisons/connections can be drawn to nearly every line of it (“Now one accidentally emerges among accidental things and almost takes fright at not being invited” (97)…I mean, come on!). Malte’s “overwhelming question” is “My God, if it were possible to impart something of it. But would it exist then, would it exist?” (54)…”And will they, in any event see what I am saying here” (111).

A Favorite Quotation:“Flowers and fruits are ripe when they fall; animals feel themselves and find one another and are satisfied. But we, who have made God for ourselves, we can not find satisfaction” (174).

A Favorite Scene: When his dog reproaches him for letting death in. Touching. (121).

A Quotation That, Perhaps, Sums Up My Reading Experience: “Many things came into my hands that, so to speak, ought to have been read already, for other things it was much too soon; nothing at that time was just right for the present. But nevertheless I read” (148).
(less)

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Feb 14, 2012 Lucian McMahon rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It would be a lie to say I didn't at least partially enjoy this book. Then again, it would also be a lie to say that I understood even half of it. It really is a poem in prose form, and I most definitely missed most of what Rilke was trying to say. Nevertheless, I did take some pleasure in reading it. I only give it two stars because, like I said, I have no idea what this book is about (Am I an ignoramus for saying I don't even care to find out what this book is about?). That, and his prose stru...more

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Oct 21, 2011 Barbara rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bloom-canon, classics

Rilke's extraordinary semi-autobiographical novel deals with masking our true selves and others in order to fit into the bewildering chaos of the world around us. The writer (Rilke or Brigge, take your pick) takes us through visions, memories, and impressions, and starkly contrasts these with the world as he now experiences it. The work is beautifully amorphous, and surprisingly funny:

"There is a being that is completely harmless if it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediate...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Tamer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics, german-literature, poetry

This novel is amazing.

I am sitting here, reading the responses left by others, and what the hell? Most of you are downgrading this book due to the lack of Rilke's message in this book. For those of you who do not know Rilke, Rilke is considered one of the worlds greatest poets, as this was his first and only novel. If you do not like, nor prefer poetry, this novel is not for you.

The book is a compilation of narrative, philosophical asides, sketches for future poems, and detailed descriptions of artwork. It is clear that the writer is a poet, for much of the content does not make sense except in an irrational way.

As every selection in the book shows, he prefers to sit in the corner with his notebook making observations about those around him or delving into his reminiscences from home, never getting up and actually entering into the reality of life. Those who need a clear plot and a reliable narrator beware. This book is non-linear and reads more like poetry than a traditional novel. Or even as a diary. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a challenging novel, as there is no storyline, nor plot structure. Instead, this the notes in this novel deliver an cryptic poetic message.

I can see ones point when claiming they do not understand why there is German words in this novel, despite it being translated. When reading, just like everyone else, I’m garbling the pronunciation, but it doesn't matter. I like the sounds. And not only the sounds, I enjoy the anticipation, the holding-my-breath quality of knowing that the English words sit right there, across the gutter of the page. The fact that the translator did not take all of Rilke's words and water them down, but instead leaves them there for the readers to witness Rilke's real words and beauty, makes the novel that much better.

I just started reading this novel, and I can say with merriment that I'm extremely drawn in by the compelled beauty in which Rilke delivers. This novel is truly amazing, as I see it as nothing less. I hate seeing RM's work get bashed, all because some people can't endure beautiful literature. This is a novel I shall posses for the rest of my life.(less)

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Sep 16, 2009 anca dc rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008-2009

Rilke. Rilke preocupat de moarte, feţe, maini. Rilke singur, Rilke pe strazile Parisului, Rilke copil, Rilke scriind si neterminind, Rilke indragostit, Rilke iubitor de mama, Rilke ascultind linistea, Rilke cautator de Dumnezeu, dorind sa atinga “treapta”. Rainer Maria Rilke. Insemnarile lui Malte Laurids Brigge.

~~~

Pe atunci se stia (sau poate doar se banuia) ca moartea zace in om precum simburele in fruct. Copiii aveau in ei una mica, iar virstnicii una mare. Femeile o purtau in pintece, iar b...more

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Apr 29, 2008 Katherine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: underrated

More like The LiveJournal of Rainer Maria Rilke. I loved this.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is an experimental, surrealistic novel in episodes, and reading it is like finding a lost artifact. Our narrator is a young Danish nobleman, estranged from his family, disillusioned with the romance of being a starving artist in Paris, and searching for a symbolic story that fits his experience. Malte's journeys are lush and visual and delightfully weird, and we get to follow him through the down-...more

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May 08, 2008 D.S. Mattison rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read the version with an introduction written by William Gass and translation by Stephen Mitchell. Gass writes, "Rilke is not Malte, but Malte is Rilke." It is important to keep this in mind when wandering around the Paris streets with Malte, a young Danish nobleman who has left his family home in favor of the life of a romantic poet and who suffers from fits of remembrance. He also suffers from an acute anxiety caused in the search for the love that gives of itself. Although written without c...more

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Feb 01, 2011 Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it 2 of 5 stars

Rainer Maria Rilke is considered to be the greatest German lyric poet--an assertion to which I could not personally agree or disagree with because I haven't read any of his poetry. For a while he lived in Paris, sometime during the beginning of the 20th century, and it was here that he began to send his former lover letters from which this novel (the only one he wrote) actually originated.

Like Rilke at that time, the sole protagonist in this novel , Malte Laurids Brigge, is likewise a foreigner(...more Rainer Maria Rilke is considered to be the greatest German lyric poet--an assertion to which I could not personally agree or disagree with because I haven't read any of his poetry. For a while he lived in Paris, sometime during the beginning of the 20th century, and it was here that he began to send his former lover letters from which this novel (the only one he wrote) actually originated.

Like Rilke at that time, the sole protagonist in this novel , Malte Laurids Brigge, is likewise a foreigner(a Danish nobleman) living in Paris and a poet. Written in a journal form, Brigge here muses about almost everything: his family, its history, God, women, love, life, death, art, poetry, reading and what have you (but not food, or chess, I did notice that). He recalls, narrates, makes one-way conversations (several times with God), goes into seemingly endless soliloquies, babbles like a drunk (I'm sure not really, but that was how he sounded--at times--to me). There are streams of consciousness, rivers of unconsciousness and oceans of hallucinations here. What a headache! Here, for example, is Brigge/Rilke writing about fate, life, God, man, woman and love (I picked a short one; only the novel should give the reader a headache, not a mere review of it):

"Fate loves to invent designs and patterns. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has just a few elements, of a grandeur that we can never fathom. The saint, rejecting fate, chooses these and comes face to face with God. But the fact that woman, in accordance with her nature, must make the same choice in relation to man--this is what calls forth the doomed quality of all love relationships: resolute and fateless, like an eternal being, she stands beside the one who is transformed. The woman who loves always surpasses the man she loves, because life is larger than fate. Her self-surrender wants to be infinite: this is her happiness. But the nameless suffering of her love has always been that she is required to limit this self-surrender."

Imagine 260 pages of such nice-sounding, but practically incomprehensible, prose! Well, most probably I was just not up to the task of properly reading this novel which some consider to be "one of the most influential and enduring works of fiction of our century." Let me just say, then, that this book has a grandeur I can never fathom. So instead of one, I'll give it two stars. It was OK. I have to play it safe, ha, ha(less)

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Mar 20, 2013 Nick Wellings rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A bizarre book but not in the way we might now think of the word - a melange of the shocking or outré or the inconsistent or absurd - rather I mean bizarre because of the impressions we get page by page as Rilke's subject matter flits from three or four principal concerns, shown in three or four historical settings. (To say this is to impose a more solid structure than is revealed at a first read).

The subject matter: As the blurb says, there is death all around, or rather, people carry death wi...more

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Feb 07, 2012 Nick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"And so, when I returned to Ulsgaard and saw all the books, I pounced on them in a real hurry and with an almost bad conscience. At that time I somehow had a presentiment, which I so often felt later on, that we didn't have the right to open a book if we weren't committed to reading all of them. With every line you broke off a piece of the world. Before books the world was unharmed and perhaps in time it would be whole again. But how could I, unable to read, be a match for them all? There they s

...more

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Apr 27, 2013 Anna rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' isn't a very novelistic novel, as it is told as a sort of diary in the first person and is semi-autobiographical. Brigge is a twenty-eight year old Danish man, alone and adrift in Paris. He wishes to transmute his fear of death into some profound literary work and fills his notebooks with memories, historical anecdote, and sketches of the Parisian streets. I was very moved by Rilke's evocation of urban alienation, of listening to your neighbours through th...more 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' isn't a very novelistic novel, as it is told as a sort of diary in the first person and is semi-autobiographical. Brigge is a twenty-eight year old Danish man, alone and adrift in Paris. He wishes to transmute his fear of death into some profound literary work and fills his notebooks with memories, historical anecdote, and sketches of the Parisian streets. I was very moved by Rilke's evocation of urban alienation, of listening to your neighbours through the walls of a cheap rented room because you have no-one to talk to, and of death-obsession. I identified with Brigge's preoccupations, having on occasion been in just the same state of mind myself. On the other hand, towards the end of the book Brigge writes more of love than death, and this made him harder for me to relate to. (This probably doesn't reflect too well on me.)

Brigge, a solitary and melancholic figure with no direction in life but periodically overwhelmed by fear of death, seems to be a shadow or echo of Rilke. Perhaps he represents someone Rilke thought he could have been? Brigge is unhappy and there is no indication that he will ever transcend his poverty and perpetual introspection. I can very well understand being afraid of such a lonely trap of a life. In fact, one might subtitle this book, 'The Dangers of Being an Unhappy Introvert in Paris'. During the first third or so I was rather reminded of Plath's 'The Bell Jar'.

Rilke's writing is absolutely beautiful, which isn't surprising as he was famous as a poet. In fact, this was his only novel. By way of example, I was struck by this bit about reading:

'Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all. With every line you read, you were breaking off a portion of the world. Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again.'

I tend to find poetry intimidating and impossible to understand, but I ought to give Rilke's a chance. 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' suggests I have an affinity with him. No other writer I've come across has articulated the fear of death as effectively. (less)

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Mar 25, 2013 William rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is not a novel in the formal sense. (No story unfolds) It is more of a record of Rilke's early perceptions--some passages were taken directly from his letters--and it is not a easy book. Rilke himself referred to it as a 'heavy, difficult book.' But there are great treasures in this book, if the reader is willing make an effort to read and consider, instead of just scanning for plot points and information. In one section a ghost appears. In another section the narrator undergoes electro-sho...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Kilburn Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've read a few German books already this year. So I thought I'd give Rilke a go. I first found out about this writer in Walter Kaufmann's book Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre. And looking at Kaufmann's book right now, I see that Kaufmann has essentially just published a few short extracts from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. And a brief biography.

This is Rilke's only novel. It's semi-autobiographical. And he addresses existential themes - such as individuality and death. You can...more

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Oct 06, 2010 Erik Deurmeier rated it 4 of 5 stars

Oh my goodness. My brain is still sore, but wonderfully sore, after reading this a few months ago. I love Rilke and love his touch with words. Even this prose is so beautifully written it's like poetry. It was the nature of style it was written in that gave me a bit of a challenge at first. Malte is taken from memories of his childhood to contemplations on characters in front of him in the street to descriptions of his evening in his apartment all in the same paragraph and you have to just let g...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Keith Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i didn't realize there were notes in the back, and i certainly didn't approach it with the right mind set. that said, it's difficult not to appreciate the ebullient misery, delicacy and rare beauty of its style.

it must have been one of those early mornings that sometimes appear in July - fresh, rested hours in which spontaneous events are happening everywhere. Out of a million small irrepressible movements a mosaic of life is created, utterly convincing in its reality...

i wish i could say that...more i didn't realize there were notes in the back, and i certainly didn't approach it with the right mind set. that said, it's difficult not to appreciate the ebullient misery, delicacy and rare beauty of its style.

it must have been one of those early mornings that sometimes appear in July - fresh, rested hours in which spontaneous events are happening everywhere. Out of a million small irrepressible movements a mosaic of life is created, utterly convincing in its reality...

i wish i could say that Rilke's overall mosaic is as convincing as his rare summer morning, but it's too sacred. reality is precious, yes, but i'm unaccustomed to it being whispered about so forcefully. Malte's suprasensitive vision bobbles wildly like an agitated seismograph, but it never makes a graceful return to baseline. the novel becomes a series of images like desserts, each one as rich as the last, until one begins to question the intentions of the host.

although i didn't think the novel was sustaining in any conventional way, his ennobling descriptions of the poor and his humility are touching to read. the vignettes with the poor man in the fine clothes and the woman with the shriveled arm are about the most honorable, humanistic passages i've ever read.

The colors are meaningless, of course, and it's petty of me to remember them. I just want to say that on him they were like the softest down on a bird's breast. He himself didn't get any pleasure from them, and who among all these people (I looked around me) could have thought that this finery was meant for them?... Malte has an epiphany: My God, I thought with sudden vehemence, so you really are. This, then, is what tastes good to you; this is what gives you pleasure. That we should learn to endure everything and never judge. What things are filled with gravity? What things with grace? Only you know. When winter comes again and I need a new coat - grant that I may wear it like that, for as long as it is new.

passages like this become almost Biblical. parables and prayers and bald mystical language swirl together to create something truly fascinating to read.(less)

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Jan 20, 2013 Bridie Wilkinson rated it 4 of 5 stars

The first word that comes to mind when I think of how to describe this novel is "delicate". The prose is beautiful, tense, and although there isn't a clear narrative throughout it's easy to get lost in Rilke's blatantly poetic writing. Although some references to what reveal themselves to be major themes of the work seem repetitive and forced at times, you truly get a sense of a man preoccupied with death, fear, identity and his mortality. An aspect that I wasn't expecting lied in his relation a...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Abigail added it · review of another edition

"Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? ... the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. ... Because, my God!, it is all there. You come, you find a life, ready-made, you just have to slip it on." (9)

"But wherever there is someone who gathers himself together, some solitary person, for example, who wants to rest roundly upon his whole circumference, day and night, he immediately provokes the opposition, the contempt, the hatred of those degener...more

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Mar 03, 2010 Farren rated it 4 of 5 stars

Much was made of Rilke's compassion for/interest in women in this book. For myself, I felt that his determination of women as a higher, purer sex more given to expressing love--the profoundest emotion in the world--as opposed to receiving it, was sexism of a different brand than Nietzsche's bilious and hateful characterization of women as creeping, conniving vermin. In both cases, it is a reduction and confinement of a person based on gender status and it makes me feel weird.

Felt MLB's neurotic...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Andrew added it

Shelves: german-language-fiction

Dense, peculiar, at times impenetrable, at times utterly bursting with stunning imagery, this is an immensely difficult book to pin down. And it got under my skin. Proust crashing headlong into Dostoyevsky. This is what happens when a writer who is, at heart, a lyrical romantic faces the dawning industrial era with a combination of absolute trepidation and awe.

And if you live alone, in a foreign city, sure of not very much, your mind periodically drawn back to a childhood in a frigid Northern cl...more

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Nov 20, 2009 Jimmy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: austria, austria-hungary, male, novel, year-1910s, truly-madly-deeply-original

"What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers."

It is precisely because the form of this book is so hard to pin down that it is so effective. It challenges the reader to forget about the novel, and its easy explications and narrative arcs. (Though it feels much too organically arisen for me to use the term 'experimental'). Here we have...more

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Mar 23, 2013 Sam Nerveza added it

This book will alter your perception (bend your mind)…in several ways simultaneously. It is very much a Through-The-Looking-Glass sort of experience. To any who've read, or who read, Sebald, it will be apparent that Rilke is his literary "father" or perhaps "grandfather". Though considered a novel, I'm not sure it can necessarily be approached as such…unless you've read much Sebald, or for example, have an experienced engagement with modernity by way of Baudelaire, Dickens, et al. It is (forgive...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Lewis Shaw rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Deeply edifying and frustrating in turn. Full of passages of striking beauty and original images, secret correspondences and mysterious significances. As any notebook, it is the representation of half a head. There is much submerged, unknown. Like the one half of Goethe's 'Correspondences with a child', the replies are not read, and the context is never fully limned. I found it most engaging in its allignment with a sort of Modernist literature of alienated existentialism (Sartre, Hamsun), and d...more

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Sep 05, 2010 Laura Harmon rated it 3 of 5 stars

I decided to reread this book recently because it didn't have any lasting effect on me when I read it about five years ago, and I could barely remember what it was about. Maybe I'm just more open to this kind of writing now, or maybe it's having spent time in and gotten a feel for some of the places he is talking about, but on second-read, I was way more engaged and pleasantly surprised. I think the eeriness, desperation, and solitude are portrayed in very well-crafted, non-direct ways, and I gu...more

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May 16, 2008 Babak rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

آبه لونه!

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Oct 06, 2011 Scott rated it 3 of 5 stars

I found this montage of the experiences of a young Danish poet living in Paris intriguing. Malte sees the world with a deeply disarming lucidity which allows Rilke to craft vivid descriptions. During a feverish illness Malte is overtaken by absurd fears:

"I am lying in my bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands. As something that has been lost for a long time reappears one morning in its old place, safe and sound, almost newer than when it va...more

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Jan 07, 2012 John David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, favorites

Reading “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” is to have the feeling that you have never before read words used in exactly this way for exactly this purpose. Rilke, perhaps most known for being the greatest German-language poet of the twentieth century, has written what can only be called a prose poem – but even to use this phrase is to reduce a fullness that cannot be reduced. This novel is symphonic, lush, and poignant. In its evocation of memory, it is Proust avant la lettre. But there are...more Reading “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” is to have the feeling that you have never before read words used in exactly this way for exactly this purpose. Rilke, perhaps most known for being the greatest German-language poet of the twentieth century, has written what can only be called a prose poem – but even to use this phrase is to reduce a fullness that cannot be reduced. This novel is symphonic, lush, and poignant. In its evocation of memory, it is Proust avant la lettre. But there are also moments of pureness and clarity that are reminiscent of Wittgenstein, which creates quite a striking contrast. Rilke’s experience with art and art criticism highly influenced his writing. His prose-poetry is pure imagism, but is also full of expressionism and impressionism. All of this sounds like an unlikely salmagundi, but I can assure you that there is something lasting and moving that inheres.

We are so used to novels being narratives of action that when we meet something like this, it gives us pause. There really is no plot here as most people would conceive it. The narrator calls to mind Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, brooding and destitute. Malte is haunted by the doppelgangers that he lived with during his well-to-do childhood, all now long dead; he is the only member of his ancient Danish aristocratic family. The book flits in and out of memories of the deaths of his father and other relatives and their relationships. In many novels, one can easily separate, if one wishes, content and form; here they seem to belong to one another, the poetry and the memory inextricably intertwined.

Unlike many other reviewers, I wouldn’t say that the novel is difficult reading, but it might not be something that you want to read in one or two sittings. Like the “Duino Elegies” or the “Sonnets to Orpheus,” they are meant to be dipped into. The text (at least in this edition) is subdivided into seventy-one parts which serve as breaks for the narrative line of thought. If you will excuse the length, this is from section twenty-nine, and it is representative of the style throughout:

“One thing is certain: that on that evening I was drawing a knight, a quite solitary and unmistakable knight, mounted on a strangely caparisoned steed. He turned out so brightly colored that I had to change crayons frequently; but it was the red one that I used most of all, and reached for time and again. Now I needed it once again; but it rolled (I still see it) right across the brightened page, to the edge, and fell down, past me, before I could stop it, and was gone. I really did need it urgently, and having to climb down after it was distinctly vexing. Awkward as I was, it was quite a business to get down; my legs were far too long, and I couldn’t draw them out from under me: remaining too long in a kneeling position had numbed my limbs; I could not tell what was mine and what was the chair’s. At length, rather at sixes and sevens, I did make it to the floor, and found myself on an animal fell that extended under the table to the wall. But at this point I was confronted with a fresh difficulty. My eyes, accustomed to the brightness above and still wholly entranced by the colors on the white paper, were unable to make out anything at all below the table, where the blackness seemed so dense that I was afraid of knocking against it; so I fell back on my sense of touch and, kneeling and supporting myself on my left hand, combed through the cool, long-haired, familiar-feeling fell with my other hand. But there was no sign of the crayon.”
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Nov 02, 2011 Alik rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

В статье Маргрет Айфлер "Existentielle Verwandlung in Rilkes Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge" (The German Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Jan., 1972), pp. 107-113) в качестве одной из фигур, на примере которой Рильке показывает возможность преобразования ограниченного ego в целях саморасширения (Verwandlungsmöglichkeit vom begrenzten Ich zur Selbsterweiterung, 111) упоминается Krischna Otropjow, самозванец ("lebte die Rolle eines falschen Zaren", ибид).

Я человек, историческим сознанием слабый...more

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Sep 04, 2009 Ibon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Das beste Geschenk, dass mir mein Vater je gemacht hat. Ein echtes Novemberbuch. Hoffentlich ein sonniger November...

S59

Es sind ein wenig abgelegene Stellen wo man sie findet, aber durchaus nicht versteckte. Die Büsche treten zurück, der Weg wendet sich ein wenig um den Rasenplatz herum: da stehen sie und haben eine Menge durchsichtigen Raumes um sich, als ob sie unter einem Glassturz stünden. Du könntest sie für nachdenkliche Spaziergänger halten, diese unscheinbaren Männer von kleiner, in jede...more

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Feb 12, 2009 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, fiction, read-and-reread, lplib-classics, u-of-chicago, mitteleuropa, dalkey-archive, paris-with-love

Rilke was a poet and his only novel demonstrates that on every page. It is a dreamlike novel that is evocative of Paris and poetry. The focus on themes of death and darkness in contrast with the power of god and belief were powerful, joining with his beautiful writing to keep me enthralled. The importance of constructing an authentic life is emphasized as a prerequisite for the prospect of a unique personal death. Death becomes a character in the novel, a "terrible rival", which may seem stronge...more

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About Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two mos...more

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Books by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

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Quotes from The Notebooks of Malte...

“For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.” — 125 people liked it

“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.” — 68 people liked it

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