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by: Rainer Maria Rilke
List Price: $13.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.16 You Save: $2.79 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780393308815
ISBN: 0393308812
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 238
Publication Date: 1992-04
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Sales Rank: 457993
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - 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, ... Read More
Rating:  - great, beautiful, but patchy
Although I love Rilke's poetry (check out Archaic Torso of Apollo, now!)I read this for my job, which is to re-tell classic lit. for ESL university students. Itleads to a strange reading style whereby I'm weighing abridgement optiopns as I proceed but I still found myself amazed by some passages in this book, particularly those of a surrealistic vein which I wasn't prepared for having read his poetry. Anyway! I was struck by the books similarities to the previous book I abridged, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werthe, ... Read More
Rating:  - Nausea, in a good way
Brigge seems to be journaling through some rage here. But a good kind of rage, the kind that somehow weaves childhood memories together with weird historical anecdotes with existential subtexts. There's some hefty reference to traditional French and German poets, and a few of the more famous nuns out there, but I think I was happiest when he kept it personal and wrote about his walks around Paris. Some might disagree with me, but I really think this book is about dogs. Rilke's dogs don't trouble themselves with the ... Read More
Rating: - Book from my young adulthood
I discovered this book quite by accident, so it has a a special place for me. I found it at a used book sale in my home town, pop. 2000, and was so curious as to what exactly it was about, I bought it, figuring it had to have some value. Needless to say, it was like nothing I'd read at that point, being all of 21. It didn't matter to me that the book was plotless (as has been noted elsewhere)--the prose was gorgeous.
I still have my copy, and have gone back to it a number of times in the last 20 years. At one ... Read More
Rating: - An intellectual goldmine...
This proto-existentialist novel features a main character (Malte) that is frightened by the possibility of faceless-ness; that is, he is terrified by the collapse of a coherent subject/identity in modernity. This work is highly critical of the traditional narrative where everything occurs in a logical and temporal order that is coherent and teleological. Through the character of Malte, Rilke illustrates the decay of such an understanding of one's self and the chaos that results.
Rilke read a lot of Nietzsche ... Read More
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