Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

A young Danish poet wanders the streets of Paris, and what he finds there is himself, dissolving. Rilke's only novel exists in the space between diary and dream, between memory and the pitiless present. Malte Laurids Brigge has come to the city to learn how to be a poet, but what he learns instead is how fragile consciousness is, how thin the membrane between seeing and being seen, between the living and the dead. The seventy-one fragments that comprise this book read like prose poems turned inward: childhood traumas resurface without warning, strangers on the street become mirrors for unnamed terrors, and the city itself becomes a landscape of the soul. Rilke wrote that he wanted to capture 'the things themselves' before they became smoothed over by language, and what emerges is a book about the failure of words and the terror of being alive. It is a portrait of an artist paralyzed by the weight of his own sensitivity, and one of the most radical experiments in modernist fiction.