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.