It is rare to encounter a literary work that is so deeply immersed in the artistic and cultural currents of its time, and yet so impossible to categorize as Rilke’s
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge(1910). At once heavily autobiographical and highly fictionalized,
The Notebooksconsists of the diary-like reflections of its eponymous protagonist, a 28-year-old Danish writer living in obscurity and at the edge of total destitution in turn-of-the-century Paris. As a modernist novel that depicts the textures of interiority and memory,
The Notebooksinvites comparisons to Proust and Woolf. As a city novel, the work belongs in the tradition of the literary flâneur that extends from Poe to Baudelaire to Hamsun, as well as the anti-tradition of modernist representations of the city in…
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Citation: Dittrich, Josh. "Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 August 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11478, accessed 23 November 2024.]
