Rainer Maria Rilke

"The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Michael Hulse
Penguin: 2009

This is the only novel by the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke and summing this book up is no easy task. I waited a few days to give me some perspective. It did not happen. It was a surprise. I knew that Rilke had issues of loneliness and fears of death. That shows in these notebooks because this novel is just that, a series of notebooks by Malte Laurids Brigge, a stand-in for the author. Yet, this book is so much more.

I did not have to "plow" through this book as I expected to. In it, are story after story of what had happened to the author during his life. It is full of ghosts, people drawn from the author's life along with the fears he was feeling when he wrote this book. He was in Paris and a large city, inhospitable to the young man and yet full of what he wanted to know and experience.

So many of us have felt this in our lives when we arrive in a strange city, away from our home and our family members and young without the maturity of seeing the reality that existed on the pavements, in the small apartments and the oddity of people that we are seeing for the first time as it really is and not filtered through our fears. Rilke was full of fear and knew that the only way he could deal with these fears was to examine them through his own writings.

Many things filled him with fear and dread including illness, being treated by an uncaring health professional and being around people with life-threatening disease and problems. He would listen to his unseen neighbor who was a medical student, follow people with gross physical problems and watch the buildings with their ugly facades. He would remember the stories of his youth and the odd and strange ghost episodes that he saw with his father.

Everything is narrated by exceptional prose that showed Brigge trying to make sense of his life. It is exceptionally well written and a joy to read out loud which is what I did from time to time. There is so much in this novel that it can only be read and re-read again and again. Unfortunately, it is a book from the English library of the university. I can only get books that happen to fall into my hands. I will have to return it.

If a reader comes across this book, I really recommend a slow and easy reading in order to savor its wonderful words, its style and the way it is put together. Then after the first reading, I would read it again because this book like Rilke's poems bears reading over and over again for the hidden and deeper layers that will come to the surface. I don't think there is a way of exhausting the deeper meanings and stories of this book.