'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the German language’s major poets from the last century, wrote only one novel. Translator Edward Snow’s introduction to the new edition of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge focuses on the slender book’s dependance on autobiographical memory, its sharp crisscross between past and present. With its early last century Paris setting (Rilke completed The Notebooks in 1910), one can’t help thinking of Proust—if the French author had been in a succinct mood.
Rilke’s novel was alert to the varied states of mind experienced (endured?) by its protagonist. Snow describes “the hypersensorial descriptions and visualizations, the amazements of metaphor.” The voice heard in the novel is often anxious, alone, alert. “There are multitudes of people, of course, but even more faces, since each person has several,” Rilke wrote.
