Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

Aufzeichnungen Des Malte Laurids Brigge (Insel Taschenbuch)
Aufzeichnungen Des Malte Laurids Brigge (Insel Taschenbuch)
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1996 (1910).

They call it a novel, but the notebook format basically turns it into a series of prose poems held together by the Brigge persona, who sometimes is a solid character with a personal history and sometimes is just a voice - more willfully naive than a lot of Rilke's poetic speakers but recognizably continuous with them. So it's a book of wonderful moments: funny, often scary, circling around anonymity, death and time. My favorite might have been the fable about the man who exchanges his fifty remaining years of life for a titanic heap of seconds, which immediately start to vanish on him - but it's hard to choose.
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mooxyjoo
i think i've been reading this for like three or four years. i might love it, but it's more being impressed than being in love, because there are too many places where malte's superior attitude alienates me from the otherwise often eerily close identification i can bring about with some other passages. but that's rilke for you, i guess.

the enormous sympathy and hope i felt for the man with the spasm that he followed - still hard to believe. the story about young malte and the hand was also arresting (though i believe i flatly misunderstood it the first time through, which made it better).

but i'm using it as an occasion for careful thinking about a book's total meaning, which i feel is a skill i have little practiced. especially about DEATH. i re-started recently in order to map out some very careful notes, but i got sidetracked by 'real work' and by faust and mason and dixon. i wrote a blog entry about it which mostly interests me because i can't remember the last time i wrote something there that felt plainly false and kept it anyway.
Metameat
YOUR entry! I was trying to remember where I had just read that.

I might also have misunderstood about young Malte and the hand; it's also a while ago that I started reading it.
mooxyjoo
i would have to go back and check, but i think my first reading was: malte mistook her (christine's? i forget) hand for a disembodied or non-corporeal or whatever one, another example of his special relationship to objects / broken relationship to people. but it seems as if she, too, 'saw' something and gave credence to it (so it couldn't have been her hand) - which is more boring.

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