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A review by kyra_fred
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
4.0
“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.
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.