The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rilke, Rainer Maria; Translated by Stephen Mitchell

ISBN 10: 039453011X / ISBN 13: 9780394530116

Published by Random House, New York, 1983

About this Item

First Edition (stated) First Printing in gilt-stamped beige-gray cloth and original $16.95-priced dust jacket, red topstain bright, no markings, NOT ex-lib, binding tight pages bright, boards sharp-cornered, small stain rear panel top corner, quiet creasing to front jacket flap edge, else Fine unread copy (dj in mylar protector); sm 8vo; 277pp; illustrated endpapers.

Seller Inventory # 33825

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039453011X
• ISBN 13: 9780394530116
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry
  • Fiction / Literature

About this title

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.

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.