The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

THE NOTEBOOKS OFMALTE LAURIDS BRIGGEThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke's major prose work and was one of the earliest publications to introduce him to American readers. The very wide audience which Rilke's work commands today will welcome the reissue in paperback of this extremely perceptive translation of the Notebooks by M. D. Herter Norton, who has also provided a foreword and many helpful and interesting notes on the text.This volume-"spiritually one of the few relevant books of our century" —is too personal, too original to be classified under any fixed genre. Rilke insisted that it was not autobiographical, yet despite its imaginary background it is profoundly self-revealing, and many of the episodes may be traced to actual experiences in Rilke's life. The writer of the Notebooks, a young man who is given the name Malte Laurids Brigge, takes stock of himself, recalls his childhood, and describes his thoughts and sensations with extraordinary suggestiveness. He muses on the meanings of things and develops many themes which we have come to recognize as most characteristic of Rilke.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 awarenesses as do his poems.The Notebooks marked an important stage in Rilke's "these journals are something like an underpinning," he said. Indeed, this book greatly enlarges understanding of all of Rilke's works.W. W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, NEW YORK, LONDON

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.