The Notebooks
of Malte Laurids Brigge
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Random House, 1983

First published in 1910, Rilke's only novel has proven to be one of the most influential and enduring works of fiction of the twentieth century — an instance of lyric expression unmatched in modern prose.

Malte Laurids Brigge is a young Danish nobleman and poet living in Paris. Obsessed with death and with the reality that hides behind appearances, Brigge muses on his family and their history and on the teeming, alien life he sees in the city around him. Many of the themes and images that occur in Rilke's poetry can also be found in the densely packed, resonant pages of the novel, which prefigures the modernist movement in its self-awareness and imagistic immediacy.

Stephen Mitchell, whose The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke has been universally praised as one of the most inspired poetic translations to have appeared this century, has produced a powerfully fluent contemporary version of this great book which will make it available to a whole new generation of readers.