2 posts tagged “rainer maria rilke”
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.
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.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Geschichten vom Lieben Gott. (Stories of God.) Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1929 (1900).
A weird little book, one of those you sometimes get when an enormously talented writer is still casting around for a form. The central conceit (unnamed narrator telling fables about the Christian God that eventually get repeated to the town children) is kind of twee; but the early stories in particular are memorable, with a confused and absent-minded God banishing His hands from His presence and trying to see humans naked because He can't remember what they look like. The physical book itself is a wonderful little artifact I found at Moe's, with a flower pressed between its pages some time between 1929 and now; it made J. exclaim, "God, Sebald is such a bad writer -- he writes about that sort of thing all the time and adds nothing to it -"
A weird little book, one of those you sometimes get when an enormously talented writer is still casting around for a form. The central conceit (unnamed narrator telling fables about the Christian God that eventually get repeated to the town children) is kind of twee; but the early stories in particular are memorable, with a confused and absent-minded God banishing His hands from His presence and trying to see humans naked because He can't remember what they look like. The physical book itself is a wonderful little artifact I found at Moe's, with a flower pressed between its pages some time between 1929 and now; it made J. exclaim, "God, Sebald is such a bad writer -- he writes about that sort of thing all the time and adds nothing to it -"
