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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Paperback)

~ (Author), M.D. Herter Norton (Translator)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge + Letters to a Young Poet + The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
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  • This item: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Burton Pike

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"An almost perfect equivalent for the original." -- The New York Review of Books

"An extraordinary...translation of one of the world's most beautiful books." -- Philadelphia Inquirer -- Review --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.


Review

"One of the world's most beautiful books."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 238 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 1992)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0393308812
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393308815
  • Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #656,037 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #39 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( R ) > Rilke, Rainer Maria

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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
90% buy the item featured on this page:
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge 4.4 out of 5 stars (17)
$8.01
Letters to a Young Poet
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17 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (17 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars it really is a novel, March 10, 2002
By supastar (brooklyn) - See all my reviews
though it seems to be a collection of strange lyric essays moving from simple snapshots to fantastic recollections and musings. There are seeds planted early that expand and flower, painfully and beautifully and so truthfully. This is what books should do for people. Every sentence, as foreign as it can seem, you've known all your life, and you see it now in words. I don't know anything about german, but this translation is incredibly beautiful, I cannot imagine the original could work any better than this. There is no desire to move forward, you move through the pages and can't imagine having to look up. Blah blah and more blah, its really good.
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An intellectual goldmine..., April 25, 2003
By Zachary Hale (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This proto-existentialist novel features a main character (Malte) that is frightened by the possibility of faceless-ness; that is, he is terrified by the collapse of a coherent subject/identity in modernity. This work is highly critical of the traditional narrative where everything occurs in a logical and temporal order that is coherent and teleological. Through the character of Malte, Rilke illustrates the decay of such an understanding of one's self and the chaos that results.

Rilke read a lot of Nietzsche prior to writing this book, and many of the same themes Nietzsche contemplated in The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra are reworked by Rilke in this novel. It is my interpretation that Rilke was trying to work out a theory of modern, fragmented, existential subjectivity and then offer some way to make such a life livable. Rilke explores such themes as memory's transience, unpredictability, and instability, the role of a God in a world after the "death of God", and a dissolving of the conceptual categories between the self and the other, or the inside and the outside, all play into this fascinating book.

The book is written in notebook form, which plays into the notion of fragmentary identity and problematic narrative. Entries jump from the past to the present to imagined futures in an often random and chaotic order. There is no "plot" to speak of, although there are bits and pieces of narratives, but nothing sufficient enough to create a comprehensible 'Malte'. All the while, you are in the mind of a character that is trying and failing to make sense of it all (to 'impose' a narrative).

The later Martin Heidegger always lauded Rilke (despite Rilke's being too metaphysical) for being able to express ways of interacting with the world that were non-humanist. He was especially interested, and wrote significantly about, a passage (p. 46 in the Vintage paperback edition) where Malte imagines a house and its inhabitants from a single mutilated wall that is left remaining. I'm not too sure what his relation to the text as a whole was, so I'll leave it at that.

This book is an intellectual paradise and is rich in treasures as long as you are willing to look for them.

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Failing Light of Inspiration, August 30, 2001
By Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
If you read this at the right time of life no other book will ever be more important to you. I read it when I was 19 and for me that was the right age. Rilke's Notebooks contain what amounts to the crisis of modern existence. For Rilke the solution was writing some of the best poetry ever written. If you want proof read it. For Malte it was not so clear yet and his struggles will be very familiar to any student of the arts. As a time piece this also has much value. It records the change over from the old Europe to the new. For Malte, as it was for many of Mann's, Musil's, Broch's... characters, this proves devastating. Identity threatening. The second half of this book is not as good as the first half but I'll take that first half and disregard the rest. Read this while reading Rilke's greatest contribution to our world, his poetry.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Fragmented
However, fragmented in a good way--This is a book for anyone who has or is feeling set adrift by life. Read more
Published 2 months ago by J. Carpenter

2.0 out of 5 stars Tragic Angst
Based on the stellar reputation of Rilke the poet and ecstatic reviews here and elsewhere of this, his only prose work, I purchased this book with eager anticipation of... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Keith A. Comess

4.0 out of 5 stars great, beautiful, but patchy
Although I love Rilke's poetry (check out Archaic Torso of Apollo, now!)I read this for my job, which is to re-tell classic lit. for ESL university students. Read more
Published on August 27, 2007 by James Mcnaughton

5.0 out of 5 stars Nausea, in a good way
Brigge seems to be journaling through some rage here. But a good kind of rage, the kind that somehow weaves childhood memories together with weird historical anecdotes with... Read more
Published on August 20, 2007 by dangerbird

5.0 out of 5 stars Book from my young adulthood
I discovered this book quite by accident, so it has a a special place for me. I found it at a used book sale in my home town, pop. Read more
Published on June 14, 2007 by David Shaw

2.0 out of 5 stars unpleasantness
[....]Loving another does not entitle one to their love in return, but being loved by another does place one
under an obligation. Read more
Published on September 22, 2001 by Orrin C. Judd

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gift of Many Levels of Meaning
I recently had occasion to replace my worn-out (tattered) copy of The Notebooks of MLB and when my new copy arrived I started reading it. Read more
Published on June 22, 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars Virtually perfect
Rilke had some sort of command of something. And it was not merely language. His language even in translation is simple, laconic, and disturbingly unclear. Read more
Published on May 1, 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars Best available translation . . .
Mitchell's "Malte" is absolutely stunning - as valuable a gift to English readers as Kaufmann's Nietzsche translations. Read more
Published on March 6, 2001

2.0 out of 5 stars The Norton version is better
I was extremely disappointed in this version. The translation by M. D. Herter Norton is much more eloquent. Save your money and buy that one instead.
Published on January 4, 2001 by mtb0001

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