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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel

Vintage

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An enigmatic work that is not holding up well with the passage of time

I first read THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE more than 35 years ago. I found it difficult going, but I thought it profound (as I had been taught to regard it). On re-reading it, I once again find it difficult going, but now I find it less than profound. To be sure, there is some exquisite writing and some spell-binding and memorable passages. But much of it is far too cryptic and idiosyncratically private to be great literature, and occasionally it is silly. Further, in assessing the worth of the work I cannot ignore certain aspects of Rilke's personal biography, as discussed at the end of this review.

Published one hundred years ago (twelve years before completion of his acclaimed masterpieces of poetry, "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus"), NOTEBOOKS is Rilke's most extended exercise in prose. Nonetheless, the prose of NOTEBOOKS is poetic, impressionistic, and at times mystic. There is no narrative in the traditional sense and it seems rather misleading to refer to the book as a novel; indeed, more than once I have seen it called an "anti-novel". It consists of a series of meditative entries in two notebooks by a 28-year-old Dane of minor nobility, Malte Laurids Brigge. A few of the entries record, like a diary or journal, events of the ostensible present, which for the most part are Brigge's unpleasant encounters with the bustle and squalor of Paris, to which he has recently moved with limited funds. But far more entries deal either with the past - the personal past of Brigge as a child and that of his parents and forebears, as well as the past represented by a vast assortment of historical figures going back centuries, mostly nobility, saints, divines, and unrequited lovers - or with speculations ("the teeming maggots of my conjectures") about life, death, love, art, and the post-Nietzchean world without God.

The arc of the book is supplied by Brigge's search for his identity, his self. In connection with that search, Rilke deliberately invokes the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son. But it is a very self-indulgent prodigal son, and Rilke's version (such as it is) is told from his perspective. Within literary circles, NOTEBOOKS is known as one of the leading literary works of its time dealing with the search for selfhood, and it also is sometimes said to be a precursor, maybe even an early landmark, of 20th-Century existentialism. Alas, the self of Malte Laurids Brigge (perhaps like the self of Rainer Maria Rilke - ?) is not a particularly attractive or admirable one. To me, Brigge is the great-grandson and literary heir of Goethe's Werther, and NOTEBOOKS is, curiously, even more fusty than "The Sorrows of Young Werther", published more than a century earlier.

A paragraph about the translation: The first time I read NOTEBOOKS, it must have been the translation by M.D. Herter Norton. Recently, wanting to re-read it, I went looking for the volume I first read only to discover that I must have packed it away in boxes in storage. It was easier to purchase a new copy. What I bought was a translation by Stephen Mitchell. I did not particularly care for the book, and after 50 pages abandoned it, thinking that the Mitchell translation must be to blame. Then I saw that a new translation by Michael Hulse (highly regarded translator of, inter alia, several works by W.G. Sebald) had just been published by Penguin. That was the edition and version I read for this review. It turns out that I am essentially indifferent as between the Hulse and Mitchell translations. With some passages, Mitchell does a better job, though on the whole the Hulse translation seems slightly more comprehensible and lyrical. The footnotes to the Hulse translation, however, are much more informative than those to the Mitchell translation, and I found Hulse's introduction more useful than the one by William H. Gass. On those grounds, then, I recommend the Penguin/Hulse edition over the Viking/Mitchell/Gass one.

In the end, I conclude that I cannot attribute my relative disappointment on re-reading NOTEBOOKS to the translation. Rather, I think the explanation is simply that the book resonated more with a relatively callow youth than it does with someone in the autumn of his life. I also suspect that given the particular tides of Western culture over the last third of a century, NOTEBOOKS has not "worn" well.

Finally, I cannot entirely put aside the character of Rainer Maria Rilke, who was "one of the most repugnant human beings in literary history". That is the judgment of Michael Dirda, from his review of Ralph Freedman's biography of Rilke, "Life of a Poet" (contained in the excellent collection of Dirda reviews, "Bound to Please"). As Dirda explains,

"[T]his hollow-eyed communer with angels, Greek torsos, and death was not merely a selfish snob; he was also an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive * * *."

I find it impossible to marvel and ponder over cryptic pronouncements and soulful cries when I have very little respect for the man who uttered them. At bottom, it's all a sham.

If a book could be a painting

This book is a rare beauty. The language is so beautifully strewn together, filled with vivid color and wit, it is easy one of the great classics of modern literature. This is Rilke's only novel and is an enduring work that has inspired a genre, a poet that put a poet's mind in literature.

Each page is a vivid canvas in itself, this book should, in my opinion, be read slowly and allowed to ruminate on the mind instead of devoured.

This books is a collection of elegant and beautiful thoughts strung together

Master work masterfully translated

Plunge in to this work of genius and you will emerge with a new view of what can be accomplished in fiction. Some of Rilke's poetry translations do not work well and it has been said that poetry cannot be translated. I prefer to read the originals. But this translation of his only novel is brilliant.

Fragmented

However, fragmented in a good way--This is a book for anyone who has or is feeling set adrift by life. It offers no sappy "Everything will be alright"s, but just chronicles a life adrift--fragmented, distractable, and more often than not disquieted. If it sounds whiny to you shelve it until something upsets your life a little, then it's great.

The translation was solid enough for me (I've got the Norton one as well), but translation is translation. The book binding/paper seem good. Recommended.

Tragic Angst

Based on the stellar reputation of Rilke the poet and ecstatic reviews here and elsewhere of this, his only prose work, I purchased this book with eager anticipation of experiencing a seminal literary masterpiece. Perhaps it is my philistine and cynical nature, but I found this book a vast disappointment.

The book is, in essence, a series of self-absorbed and largely fatuous, angst-ridden observations of a type typical of late 19th/early 20th century adolescent intellectuals; a bildungsroman, in essence of a characteristic type. The ruminations on poetry, poverty, death (all preoccupations which are capable of elevating the thinker to the status of ruined nobility) are generally banal and thoroughly unoriginal. All that was lacking was an opium addiction. Additionally, there is no definite plot, but the approach is not "stream of consciousness", either.

Much better works on the same theme have been written by, amongst others, Dostoevsky ("Crime and Punishment", "Notes from the Underground"), Gorky ("Diary of a Man in Despair", an unjustly ignored work), Strindberg ("A Madman's Manifesto"), Huysmans ("La Bas").

In summary, this is a genre work of little literary, philosphical or poetic distinction.