“Here, in this vast, inward-bent circle of seats, there reigned an existence where everything was expectancy, emptiness, absorption: everything in the realm of happening was there inside it: gods and fate. And from it (when you looked up high) came, lightly, over the walls rim, the eternal procession of the shy.”

This book passed through me, like wind through chimes, leaving only the resonance of its music in the hollows of memory.

It is composed of notebook entries by a young Danish poet living in Paris. Malte’s writing is beautiful but frustrating if you don’t surrender to it and live in the present of each fragment. The text unfolds without lull or climax, as a continuous creation and disruption of successive thoughts and perceptions. It leaves you in a state of constant renewal, where clarity is fleeting.

Borrowing from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1902-1908) where he wrote that “most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered,” I think Malte attempts to make the unsayable momentary perceptible by mirroring the impermanence and intangibility of life within a text that is always shifting and always becoming. I get the sense that the gaps in clarity contain the mystery and depth of unsayable experience:

“Out of a million small irrepressible movements a mosaic of life is created, utterly convincing in its reality; Things vibrate into one another and out into the air, and their coolness makes the shadows vivid and gives the sun a light, spiritual clarity. In the garden nothing stands out above the rest; every flower is everywhere, and you would have to be inside each leaf and each petal not to miss anything.”

By using this prose within Malte’s diary, Rilke’s Malte collapses the individual into a larger unity with his concept of human experience.

As for similar books — I think Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer employ a similar style but reflects, instead, on the sensual experience of women and men respectively. Both were a 5 for me. Malte contains some of the best ending lines I’ve encountered.

“Somehow I had a premonition of what I’ve so often felt later in life: that you didn’t have the right to open one book if you weren’t prepared to read them all. With every line you made a break in the world. Before books, it was whole, and perhaps after them it would be whole again.”

Hold da op. Det er ikke sidste gang, jeg læser den her.

Rather fragmentary as a novel, not very integrated. It's billed as the notebooks of a fictional character, but still. Arid and somewhat random.

Let’s make one thing clear here: this is described everywhere as Rilke’s only novel, but I would never have called this book a novel. The loosely connected vignettes that make up this little tome are presented as the reflections that Malte Laurids Brigge put down on paper while living in Paris. They sound and feel like a journal, like the dream-like stream of thoughts people write down when they don’t think anyone will read their words. As such, it is a simple collections of ideas, remembrances, observations, wistful longings and fantasies – but it is not a novel. It has no real structure, no plot to properly speak of. But it captures not only Rilke’s amazing gift with words, but also the feelings of alienation, loneliness and isolation of a depressed man, living alone, in a beautiful but strange city far from his home.

I made the mistake of reading it like a novel. After “Letters to a Young Poet” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2763301028), I really should have known better and just left it on my nightstand, to read in little sips at the end of each day for a week or two – and not in great gulps, like the glutton I am.

Rilke also lived in Paris, and just like his alter ego, he was a lonely man with a fragile health, prone to melancholy, so it’s easy to assume he poured a lot of himself into these “notebooks”. The writing has a fever-dream quality to it sometimes, which makes it beautiful but also opaque: it is hard to know what is going on behind the words.

As a novel, therefore, “The Notebooks” fails, but as an exercise of style and introspection, it is a tantalizing glimpse into the mind of a remarkable poet.

4.25-4.5

RILKE, IM COMING FOR YOU.

In my opinion, this was not really a "novel," but more so a series of impressions written down by Malte, centering around the city, childhood, love, family, and the desire to live in full truth and solitude. He talks a lot about the false identities we hold, like masks we carry in our pockets, choosing one to use every day. I noticed that Rilke, or Malte, ascribed a lot of life to inanimate objects, while humans were frequently void.

The book is, of course, heart-wrenchingly beautiful, like everything Rilke has ever written. The tale of the Prodigal Son at the end had tears running down my face.

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

"I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there."

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

"And it is not yet enough to have memories. One has to be able to forget them, if there are a great many, and one must have great patience, to wait for their return. For it is not the memories in themselves that are of consequence. Only when they are become the very blood within us, our every look and gesture, nameless and no longer distinguishable from our inmost self, only then, in the rarest of hours, can the first word of a poem arise in their midst and go out from among them."

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept... [You] held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

"Is it possible, this nothing thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized, and said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had thousands of years of time to look, reflect, and write down, and that one has let the millennia pass away like a school recess in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple?
Yes, it is possible.

...Is it possible that in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, that one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which would at least have been something, with an incredibly dull slipcover, so that it looks like living-room furniture during the summer vacation?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses, as if one was telling about a coming together of many people, instead of telling about the one person they were standing around, because he was alien and died?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that one believed one has to make up for everything that happened before one was born? Is it possible one would have to remind every single person that he arose from all earlier people so that he would know it, and not let himself be talked out of it by the others, who see it differently?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that all these people know very precisely a past that never was? Is it possible that everything real is nothing to them; that their life takes its course, connected to nothing, like a clock in an empty room?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that one knows nothing about girls, who are nevertheless alive? Is it possible that one says "the women", "the children", "the boys", and doesn't suspect (in spite of all one's education doesn't suspect) that for the longest time these words have no longer had a plural, but only innumerable singulars?
Yes, it is possible.

...But, if all this is possible, has even an appearance of possibility--then for heaven's sake something has to happen. The first person who comes along, the one who has had this disquieting thought, must begin to accomplish some of what has been missed; even if he is just anyone, not the most suitable person: there is simply no one else there."

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“Because I never held you close, I hold you forever.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“To think, for instance, that I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, it stretches, like gloves one has worn on a journey. These are thrifty, simple people; they do not change their face, they never even have it cleaned. It is good enough, they say, and who can prove to them the contrary? The question of course arises, since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? They store them up. Their children will wear them. But sometimes, too, it happens that their dogs go out with them on. And why not? A face is a face.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

"Outwardly a great deal has changed. I do not know how. But within, and before You, Lord, within ourselves and before You who look on, are we not without action? We do discover that we do not know our part; we look for a mirror; we should like to remove our make-up and whatever is false and be real. But somewhere a forgotten piece of our disguise still adheres to us; some trace of exaggeration still remains in our eyebrows; we do not realize that the corners of our mouths are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughing-stock and a demi-being, with neither a real existence nor a part to play-act."

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“Ask no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice how your name is spreading around among people, don't take it more seriously than any of the other things you find on their lips. Think: your name has turned bad, and get rid of it. Take on another, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And conceal it from everyone.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“Yes, he knew that we was withdrawing from everything: not merely from human beings. A moment more and everything will have lost its meaning, and that table and the cup, and the chair to which he clings, all the near and the commonplace, will have become unintelligible, strange and heavy. So he sat there and waited until it should have happened. And defended himself no longer.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“I, who even as a child had been so distrustful of music (not because it took me out of myself more powerfully than anything else, but because I had noticed that it did not put me back where it had found me, but left me deeper down, somewhere in the heart of things unfinished)...”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

"He wouldn't have been able to say it, but even when he spent the whole day wandering around outdoors he didn't want the dogs with him ever again because they loved him as well; because looking in their eyes he could read watchfulness, sympathy, expectation, and concern; because when they were with him there was nothing he could do that didn't either delight them or hurt their feelings. But what he was aiming for at the time was that indifference of heart which early in the morning out in the fields sometimes seized him inwardly and with such purity that he would start to run in order to leave himself no time or breath to be more than a weightless moment in the morning's returning consciousness.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“Oh Malte, we just go on living, and it seems to me that everyone is distracted and busy and no one pays proper attention as we go along. As if a meteor were to fall and no one sees it and no one has made a wish. Never forget to wish for something, Malte.”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all. With every line you read, you were breaking off a portion of the world. Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again. But how was I, who could not read, to take up the challenge laid down by all of them?”

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

“I now understand very well, by the way, that a man will carry, for many a year, deep inside his wallet, the account of a dying hour."

"When I think back to my home, where there is no one left now, it always seems to me that things must have been different back then. Then, you knew, (or perhaps you sensed it) that you had your death inside you as a fruit has its core. The children had a small one in them and the grownups a large one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their chest. You had it, and that gave you a strange dignity and a quiet pride.”

"Until now I always believed that help would come."

"I already felt something had entered my life which I alone would have to walk around with, forever and ever."