The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141182210 ISBN 13: 9780141182216

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009

Synopsis

A masterly new translation of one of the first great modernist novels

In the only novel by one of the German language's greatest poets, 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 with them, and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilke's semi-autobiographical novel is a moving and powerful coming-of-age story.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

This is the definitive, widely acclaimed translation of the major prose work of one of our century's greatest poets -- "a masterpiece like no other" (Elizabeth Hardwick) -- Rilke's only novel, extraordinary for its structural uniqueness and purity of language. First published in 1910, it has proven to be one of the most influential and enduring works of fiction of our century.

Malte Laurids Brigge is a young Danish nobleman and poet living in Paris. Obsessed with death and with the reality that lurks behind appearances, Brigge muses on his family and their history and on the teeming, alien life of the city. Many of the themes and images that occur in Rilke's poetry can also be found in the novel, prefiguring the modernist movement in its self-awareness and imagistic immediacy.

From the Back Cover:

It is a book of quiet, close-knit prose studded with unforgettable scenes, set forth here in precise, analytical descriptions, there in intense, lyrical flights of near- poetry. It is uniquely Rilke and touches the reader with the same sudden revelations and uncanny awareness as do his poems.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0141182210
• ISBN 13: 9780141182216
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208