The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge occupies a singular position in the history of modernist prose. Rilke’s only ‘novel’, written in the Paris years during a pivotal crisis of the poet’s creative imagination and finished with some difficulty far from Paris, is fundamentally concerned with issues of poetic language, vision and imagination. It tells the story of Malte, a twenty-eight-year-old aristocratic Dane whose artistic aspirations bring him to Paris, where he begins to record his life crisis, experiences and memories in a series of diary-like notations. However, Rilke soon abandons the fictional convention of telling the story of an individual bound by a defined space and by chronological time. Especially in the second part, fictional plot gives way to a series of literary and historical reflections that push the work toward allegory and essayism rather than providing narrative and plot.