Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a groundbreaking masterpiece of early European modernism, published in 1910. It is a fragmented coming-of-age narrative by Rainer Maria Rilke, exploring themes of fiction, reality, empathy, and psychosis. The novel's vivid language and musical clarity are captured in Edward Snow's exquisite translation, making it an urgent contemporary achievement.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 12 January 2024
Publisher: WW Norton & Co

A groundbreaking masterpiece of early European modernism, originally published in 1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge unfurls the vivid reflections of the titular young Danish nobleman and poet. From his Parisian garret, Brigge chronicles his encounters with the city and its marginalized inhabitants, muses on his family history, and bares his earliest experiences of fear, tenderness, and desolation.

Through a poet's keen sense of language and a masterful ability to weave a narrative, Rainer Maria Rilke crafts a dazzlingly fractured coming-of-age narrative, kaleidoscopic in its alternation of vivid present encounters and equally vivid memories of childhood. Strikingly contemporary, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge unveils a writer metabolizing his own experiences to yield profound questions about fiction and reality, empathy and psychosis, and—above all—life, love, and death.

In a fascinating introduction, award-winning translator Edward Snow delves into the overlaps between Rilke's experiences and those of his protagonist, showcasing the novel's remarkable capacity for nuance and sympathy with granular attention. Snow's exquisite translation captures the astonishing cadences and musical clarity of the poet's prose, rendering The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as an urgent contemporary achievement, more than one hundred years after its composition.

Weight: 212g
Dimension: 138 x 210 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781324066088