The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics) Paperback – August 25, 2009

The great modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote only one "novel" in his lifetime: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He termed it a novel; I am not so sure. 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. I was struck, for example, at the beginning of the novel by the narrator's description of people's faces. Everyone has four or five faces they wear throughout their lives. like masks. Some wear out quickly, the seams tearing at the edges. Some never use any face but one. Once, while walking through the streets of Paris, the narrator Malte hears a woman crying down a alley. When he investigates, the woman pulls her face out of her hands so quickly that she is left palming it in a puddle of tears, her head an open chasm.Malte is a young aristocrat from Denmark without money who has moved to Paris to pursue his poetic vocation. The books flashes back and forth between his childhood memories and his observations of the people in France. In the second half of the book he hints at a love interest he left behind, an older woman who may be a relation.The work jumps around from scene to scene randomly, and I had trouble making any sense of it. That is until the end, when Malte examines the New Testament story of the Prodigal Son. He imagines this character, not as the selfish libertine popularly construed, but as a sensitive young favorite of everyone in his household. He flees his family and gives away everything he owns to his "friends" simply because he no longer wishes to be loved. To be loved is to be controlled, and he wants freedom. He will love without reciprocation, because to love is to live. The Prodigal Son, then, is a symbol of Malte and his antipathy to attachment to anyone. 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 fray 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. But I love literature which challenges me to look at the world differently. The Notebooks certainly does that.I have been a long fan of the translations of Stephen Mitchell. I was first drawn to this particular book by the excerpts in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke (Modern Library) (English & German Edition) (English and German Edition) This translation is first-rate.

Easily one of the best books I've read all year and probably one that will stay at the top of my list for years to come.There is something I want to carry around with me from every page, whether it's just a short string of words or a body of paragraphs. A meditation on life and death that is devastating, insightful, striking, and beautiful.The imagery sings, or sometimes howls, off the page: a building on fire, the people looking on in silence until the walls come crashing down. We’re going somewhere here. We’re captive passengers on a journey through a man’s mind as he strives to experience life: to “feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning,” all the while surrounded by the death that grows inside him and waits to have a life of its own.There are big themes in here: truth, love, memory, fate, self-deception, religion, time. There's enough on these pages to keep you engaged over the course of a lifetime.Another reviewer writes: "If you read this book at the right time of life, no other book will ever be as important to you." I tend to agree. But I already know it's meant to be read more than once, and at various stages of life.

I first read THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE more than 35 years ago. I found it difficult going, but I thought it profound (as I had been taught to regard it). On re-reading it, I once again find it difficult going, but now I find it less than profound. To be sure, there is some exquisite writing and some spell-binding and memorable passages. But much of it is far too cryptic and idiosyncratically private to be great literature, and occasionally it is silly. Further, in assessing the worth of the work I cannot ignore certain aspects of Rilke's personal biography, as discussed at the end of this review.Published one hundred years ago (twelve years before completion of his acclaimed masterpieces of poetry, "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus"), NOTEBOOKS is Rilke's most extended exercise in prose. Nonetheless, the prose of NOTEBOOKS is poetic, impressionistic, and at times mystic. There is no narrative in the traditional sense and it seems rather misleading to refer to the book as a novel; indeed, more than once I have seen it called an "anti-novel". It consists of a series of meditative entries in two notebooks by a 28-year-old Dane of minor nobility, Malte Laurids Brigge. A few of the entries record, like a diary or journal, events of the ostensible present, which for the most part are Brigge's unpleasant encounters with the bustle and squalor of Paris, to which he has recently moved with limited funds. But far more entries deal either with the past - the personal past of Brigge as a child and that of his parents and forebears, as well as the past represented by a vast assortment of historical figures going back centuries, mostly nobility, saints, divines, and unrequited lovers - or with speculations ("the teeming maggots of my conjectures") about life, death, love, art, and the post-Nietzchean world without God.The arc of the book is supplied by Brigge's search for his identity, his self. In connection with that search, Rilke deliberately invokes the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son. But it is a very self-indulgent prodigal son, and Rilke's version (such as it is) is told from his perspective. Within literary circles, NOTEBOOKS is known as one of the leading literary works of its time dealing with the search for selfhood, and it also is sometimes said to be a precursor, maybe even an early landmark, of 20th-Century existentialism. Alas, the self of Malte Laurids Brigge (perhaps like the self of Rainer Maria Rilke - ?) is not a particularly attractive or admirable one. To me, Brigge is the great-grandson and literary heir of Goethe's Werther, and NOTEBOOKS is, curiously, even more fusty than "The Sorrows of Young Werther", published more than a century earlier.A paragraph about the translation: The first time I read NOTEBOOKS, it must have been the translation by M.D. Herter Norton. Recently, wanting to re-read it, I went looking for the volume I first read only to discover that I must have packed it away in boxes in storage. It was easier to purchase a new copy. What I bought was a translation by Stephen Mitchell. I did not particularly care for the book, and after 50 pages abandoned it, thinking that the Mitchell translation must be to blame. Then I saw that a new translation by Michael Hulse (highly regarded translator of, inter alia, several works by W.G. Sebald) had just been published by Penguin. That was the edition and version I read for this review. It turns out that I am essentially indifferent as between the Hulse and Mitchell translations. With some passages, Mitchell does a better job, though on the whole the Hulse translation seems slightly more comprehensible and lyrical. The footnotes to the Hulse translation, however, are much more informative than those to the Mitchell translation, and I found Hulse's introduction more useful than the one by William H. Gass. On those grounds, then, I recommend the Penguin/Hulse edition over the Viking/Mitchell/Gass one.In the end, I conclude that I cannot attribute my relative disappointment on re-reading NOTEBOOKS to the translation. Rather, I think the explanation is simply that the book resonated more with a relatively callow youth than it does with someone in the autumn of his life. I also suspect that given the particular tides of Western culture over the last third of a century, NOTEBOOKS has not "worn" well.Finally, I cannot entirely put aside the character of Rainer Maria Rilke, who was "one of the most repugnant human beings in literary history". That is the judgment of Michael Dirda, from his review of Ralph Freedman's biography of Rilke, "Life of a Poet" (contained in the excellent collection of Dirda reviews, "Bound to Please"). As Dirda explains,"[T]his hollow-eyed communer with angels, Greek torsos, and death was not merely a selfish snob; he was also an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive * * *."I find it impossible to marvel and ponder over cryptic pronouncements and soulful cries when I have very little respect for the man who uttered them. At bottom, it's all a sham.