The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
A young man in Paris watching himself come apart. Anxiety and depersonalisation written before either had its name.
Psychologically subtle and cohesive even in its associative, fragmenting technique, the novel's dense prose is exhausting and exhilarating.
Malte Laurids Brigge, a young Danish poet newly arrived in Paris, keeps these notebooks from a rented room. The entries follow no sequence: a face glimpsed in the street, a death behind a hospital wall, the fever-lit interiors of a childhood in Denmark, saints and dying kings read about and half dreamed. Fear organises the writing, and the writing tries, page by page, to hold a self that keeps slipping its outline.
For a clinician the interest lies in the texture of that slippage. Rilke tracks how perception detaches from the person perceiving, how the body arrives as sensation before it is owned, how memory and dread cross without warning. Malte watches his own faculties from a small distance and reports what he sees. The prose stays with early, wordless states rather than naming them, and it treats terror as something observed rather than confessed.
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 to 1926) was an Austrian poet who wrote in German. He is known for the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, two cycles completed in 1922, and for his single novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, published in 1910. For a time he worked in Paris as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose method shaped Rilke's attention to close observation. His Letters to a Young Poet remain widely read.
Details
- 1910
- German
- 208
- 9780141182216