Some thoughts after finishing Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I went into this unprepared, not expecting much beyond a canonical proto-modernist novel of metropolitan alienation. Wrong. This is the most difficult novel I've read in years. Granted, I don't tend to seek out difficult novels: the "reading as Olympic sport" approach gives me no pleasure and novels that make even basic comprehension a strain usually frustrate me. Still, in my opinion this novel makes books like Inland by Gerald Murnane or The Waves by Virginia Woolf look simple by comparison. Why? The challenges are threefold.

First, coherence. Rilke's novel lacks any conventional plot and is structured as a set of notebooks. Each passage has its own time, space, and emotional register, with Rilke sometimes switching within passages. I found that my efforts to understand the narrator made the most headway when I asked why he would be writing a particular passage in his notebook, what the act of doing that did for him emotionally, spiritually, etc.

Another difficulty is the references. Unless you have a deep familiarity with medieval and modern history, you will probably be driven to the footnotes in order to comprehend what is going on in many of the passages. There are sections on the madness of Charles VI, the False Dmitri, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Avignon Papacy. Some of these are woven with elaborate descriptions of medieval tapestries and other artworks, along with references to letters by Goethe and the career of an Italian stage actress named Eleonora Duse.

Finally, and this is the major strength of the novel, poetry. Aside from the odd quotation (I noticed nods to the "The Archaic Torso of Apollo" and the future Duino Elegies in the novel), I am woefully unfamiliar with Rilke's poetry, and poetry in general to be honest. Rilke's passages often subordinate narrative, temporal sequence, and even intelligibility to linguistic and verbal beauty. Dream logic abounds as we ride the royal road into Malte's unconscious. The sheer density of quotable lines - quotable despite or maybe even because of their incomprehensibility - made this a difficult reading experience.

And also I was sick. My febrile mind would've reached for something easier, but I had a book club coming up. I want to reread this some day, maybe after properly immersing myself in Rilke's poetry. There's so much to be learned from this book about the inner life, about aesthetic experience, about love. I'll close with a moment of uncomplicated lyricism from the novel, describing a moment experienced in nature:

It must have been one of those early mornings that sometimes appear in July—fresh, rested hours in which joyful and spontaneous events are happening everywhere. Out of a million small irrepressible movements a mosaic of life is created, utterly convincing in its reality; Things vibrate into one another and out into the air, and their coolness makes the shadows vivid and gives the sun a light, spiritual clarity. In the garden nothing stands out above the rest; every flower is everywhere, and you would have to be inside each leaf and each petal not to miss anything.