The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

<em>The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge</em> is Rilkes major prose work and was one of the earliest publications to introduce him to American readers. The very wide audience which Rilkes work commands today will welcome the reissue in paperback of this extremely perceptive translation of the <em>Notebooks</em> by M. D. Herter Norton. A masterly translation of one of the first great modernist novels by one of the German languages greatest poets, in which a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death within them and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the citys untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilkes semi-autobiographical novel is a moving and powerful coming-of-age story.