In the genealogy of literary modernism, few texts occupy as precarious and pivotal a position as Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge). Published in 1910, on the precipice of a world war that would irrevocably shatter the geopolitical order of Europe, Rilke’s only novel anticipates the psychological fragmentation that would come to define the twentieth century. It is a work that defies generic classification, hovering uneasily between the autobiography, the diary, the prose poem, and the philosophical tract. It fundamentally registers the tremors of a world where the old stabilities of God, class, and narrative have collapsed under the weight of the modern metropolis.
The protagonist, Malte Laurids Brigge, is a twenty-eight-year-old Danish aristocrat living in self-imposed exile in Paris. Through his eyes, Rilke examines three interlocking themes that form the triad of the modern condition: the alienating horror of urban life, the ontological displacement of the expatriate, and the profound uncertainties of existence that arise when the façade of civilisation is stripped away. Malte is also an alter ego of Rilke himself: Rilke’s experience in Paris between 1902 and 1910 was marked by intense artistic development under the tutelage of Auguste Rodin.
The novel opens with a declaration that instantly overturns the romanticised Belle Époque image of Paris as the ‘City of Light’. ‘So, this is where people come to live… I would have thought it was a city to die in,’ Malte muses in his very first entry. Rilke presents the metropolis as a locus of sensory assault, a place where the boundaries between the internal self and the external world are violently breached.
The streets of Paris offer no respite. Rilke transforms the figure of the flâneur—Charles Baudelaire’s detached, strolling observer who takes pleasure in the crowd—into a terrified witness. Malte walks the streets as he is driven by a restless, kinetic anxiety. He cannot stay in his room, yet he cannot bear the street. He is trapped in a cycle of exposure.
To escape the crushing reality of Paris, Malte retreats into memory. A significant portion of the Notebooks is dedicated to his recollections of his childhood in Denmark. However, these memories do not provide a comforting refuge. Rilke uses these childhood scenes to explore the origins of Malte’s otherness. The city forces him to wear a mask of indifference, but he feels the ‘other’ taking over, including the fear, the poverty, and the madness of the city. The fear of ‘becoming other’ is the core of his existential dread.
The narrative structure of the Notebooks reflects the expat’s fractured relationship with time. The text jumps associatively between the gritty realism of Paris and the gothic atmosphere of Denmark. There is no chronological progression. This technique underscores the idea that for the exile, time is not linear. The past and present coexist in a simultaneous, often confused state. Malte writes to ‘reconstruct’ himself, revealing that exile cannot possess the whole of their history.
‘I am learning to see.’ This mantra of Malte’s is perhaps one of the most urgent lessons Rilke offers to us today. We live in an era of the attention economy, where human attention is a commodified resource mined by algorithms and digital platforms. Rilke’s demand for an unsparing, objective gaze is a call for authenticity. It challenges us to look at the uncomfortable realities, such as ageing, sickness, and boredom, that digital culture tries to scroll past.
The Notebooks ends without a clear resolution. We do not know if Malte survives his crisis, or if he succumbs and disintegrates into the streets of Paris. This lack of closure reveals Rilke’s raw honesty. To provide a happy ending would be to lie about the nature of modern existence. The uncertainty is the medium in which we must learn to swim.
By Elena Zeng
This review was written for the ACF London's EXPLORE OUR LIBRARY initiative.
