Katherine's review
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Katherine's review
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
Katherine's review
rating:
bookshelves:
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-at-heels parts of Paris and into his childhood of epic romances and unquiet ghosts.
And did I mention that it's funny?
Perhaps much of the humor is situational, as I'm also young, disillusioned, living in a strange city, and subsisting mostly on unemployment. Several passages had me cackling on the bus in self-recognition.
"I am twenty-eight years old, and I have done practically nothing. To sum it up: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad; a play entitled &q...more
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-at-heels parts of Paris and into his childhood of epic romances and unquiet ghosts.
And did I mention that it's funny?
Perhaps much of the humor is situational, as I'm also young, disillusioned, living in a strange city, and subsisting mostly on unemployment. Several passages had me cackling on the bus in self-recognition.
"I am twenty-eight years old, and I have done practically nothing. To sum it up: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad; a play entitled &q...more
