In fairness, w/r/t to the 2-star rating, much about this book is substantially better than "ok". The prose--if we can even call it "prose", and not simply "poetry"--is thrilling. Rilke, in almost every way, is the consummate poet. His natural writing style is dense and florid. He can't help but write poetry.

And this book is essentially a 200+ page meditative poem. There's not much of a story to speak of, just the recollections and observations of the aloof, melancholy protagonist. This makes it a slow, massy read. There's an eye-crossing weight to it.

Rilke's at his best here when he's pontificating on larger, capital-letter, issues--Death, The Artist, Love, etc. At his worst, he leads the reader struggling through the sludge of some loosely-connected, hoary recollections. These sections are difficult, and disrupt much of the book's rhythm and momentum. As such, a book that should probably be read quickly, over the period of several long afternoons, for me stretched out over the course of several months. So it's certainly possible that I missed something vital--that it was my reading that undermined the book's intended flow and feel.

As a younger, more patient, reader, hungrier for Rilke's poetic Truth Bombs, and more willing to delay intellectual gratification, this probably would have been much more exciting. Crusty literary curmudgeon that I am though, I would have much preferred this as a short book of quasi-essays, without all of the narrative cruft.

DNF with only 60 pages left—I know, I know, I could’ve just finished it, but despite the beautiful writing it was so incoherent as a novel (if you could really even call it that) that I just didn’t wanna slouch through reading it any more. Sorry Rilke I love you

2.5/5

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

At this stage in my life, revisiting a writer whom I last held in my hands seven years ago means turning back my life almost a full quarter, taking a chance on the idea that this bond has managed to survive on its own with very little in the way of active sustenance beyond what a seldomly reoccurring glance of renewed recognition and further promises oneself to finally return and revisit affords it. I had read Rilke in the form of his poems during the stage in my life where I thought myself finally exploring the "greats" of my own accord but in reality was merely faithfully following the rails of those myriad ivory towers in a less than Anglo direction, and my appreciation of his verse led me to his 'Letters to a Young Poet', which I still count among my favorites of the heart. Back then, I remembered being enamored with the maudlin beauty that was so different from what I had encountered in reading, both assigned and casual, up until then; in the case of the letters, I was blown over by the sympathy to women that Rilke insisted upon. These days, I'm less engaged with 'poetry for (white boy) poetry's sake', especially in the form of some newly impoverished scion of a sunken lineage who drowns himself in the royal dead with all their poetry and all their chivalry because the mere idea of treating the poor/disabled/otherwise othered living gives him a panic attack. Not very sympathetic of me, I suppose, and there's the usual caveat regarding 'lost in translation' and all that, but I didn't put it upon Rilke to pussyfootedly obsess so much over the necessary physicality of bodily functions, especially the sexual ones, or to play a Shakespeare in confining one's invocations of humanity to nobles and queens and popes and all those other collections of bones, long rendered dead and thus long rendered safe. Europe's splayed itself out enough in my instinctive recollection as is: anything accurately touted as "enduring" or "classic" doesn't require any more of the space that's already been devoted to such.

I don't mind when works of art are fixated on fear, or sickness, or death, or any of the many forms that trifectas of such have taken over the centuries when fixed into more physical, and thus more mortal, forms by their creators. I don't even mind the usual bildungsroman or even künstlerroman, although there's only so much one can do if one confines themselves to the cishet white boy straight and narrow. I mind when there is such an obvious disparity in the treatment of such subjects across a paradigm that is popularly known as 'class' in the Europa sense of the word, empathetically humanized in one scene and malignantly othered in another, depending on whether the person in question is surrounded by loyal servants within the confines of their own home, or in a public institution where bureaucracy bows to none, especially the entity known as common decency. Talk of 'modernism' pops up alongside the merry-go-round of landscapes and references, so I'm sure many a fan of Sebald either encountered this work beforehand and followed it into contemporary times or will find themselves quite at home when they choose to do some backtracking. However, if you're unimpressed with the type who finds themselves less humanly close to their next door neighbor than to long ago dynasties of art and non-Orthodox Christianity and royal blood that, for all their excruciating detail, confine themselves to spanning a couple of centuries of history of a few corners of a single span of land that considers itself a continent despite being little more than the western region of a much larger mass of land, there's not much to engage outside of that. Even the sympathy for women that I most remember drawing me to Rilke in years past comes out in rote lists and weird syllogisms involving loving and being loved, and after the fourth or fifth footnote that emphatically declared that yet another forlorn waifling of a female of minor historical repute had literally died of grief over yet another rando dude, enough was quite enough. Hints of the love of reading and the pangs that come with the inexorable passage of time, and I certainly don't mind being able to dwell on Sappho, Pisan, and the litany of other historical women, many of whom deserve my reading a work of theirs and/or that is devoted to them alone (although the whiteness will admittedly get tedious after a while). However, I don't see this surviving for long on the genuine appreciation of those who are not inside the circle of those who are trained specifically in the art of providing (or in the trick of believing that they provide) such.

Authorial intention, pure narratology, all that jazz: I came with the simple wish to be seduced, as I had been so long ago, and what I found did the trick only if I shut off the usual avenues of being and forced myself through the usual hoops. It's work that's been made more than familiar by many a member of its kind over the years, and these days, I only have the patience for such if it is singularly enough composed: old enough, distant enough, 'they didn't do this kind of thing back then' enough. For the rest, it's been there, done that, you're going to have to try a lot harder when the competition has been artificially distilled so much over the centuries that a certain member of a certain demographic need only exist in order to be, once again, hailed as a new god. Regarding this work in particular, if it is as necessary as it is proclaimed to be by the usual names, it'll prove it by surviving pronouncements such as mine on its own strength, rather than that of the usual lists, tiers, and accredited exhortations. I still would like to return to Duino and Orpheus one day, perhaps in the form of single, far more comprehensive text so I can stop second guessing myself over those infernal 'selections' of a poet's oeuvre that get churned out in a shiny new edition every decade or so. At the very least, I'll be able to hash out some reviews to accompany those long ago ratings, maybe even rediscover a spark of what enkindled me way back when. For this, though, I am done. Not the best of all possible conclusions, but at least they're as honest as can be afforded in this moment of time.

Many of them came into my hands which should probably should have been read beforehand, while for others it was much too soon; there was almost nothing that really fitted my needs at that time. And nevertheless I read.

Surreal, beautiful prose. Rilke wanders through story, parable and poetry in short sequences with tons of weird Proustian meanderings and hallucinatory imagery. Unfortunately, his writing too easily veers into incomprehensible verse.

After just a couple of days and 100 pages I am giving up. The writing is good, descriptive, but without a real story, that I can discern, this book is just not holding my interest. Last night, after about hour of reading, none of which I can relate or remember, I decided that there are other books I would rather be reading.

"Don't ask anyone to speak about you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice that your name is circulating among men, don't take this more seriously than anything else you might find in their mouths. Think rather that it has become cheapened, and throw it away. Take another name, any other, so that God can call you in the night..." (81)