The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a mesmerizing, impressionistic work published in 1910, on the lines of Pessoa's later The Book of Disquiet. Also, this work would inspire, La Nausee, one of Jean-Paul Sartre earlier literary works. Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge works with existential themes - the quest for individuality, the significance of death, and the examination of one's experiences of time as death approaches. Heavily influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, Rilke also incorporated the impressionistic techniques of artists such as Rodin and Cezanne. Rilke wrote Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a semi-autobiograohical work, while living in Paris, and although he writes of his time spent in St. Petersburg (where he would meet Leo Tolstoy), the novel discusses the overwhelming alienation that the individual feels in the modern world. Sections of the work attack religion as something that was created in the world to be used. Specifically, he targets the Christian belief in a Second Coming, a promised event that can only lead to a universal sense of "waiting." This point foreshadows Beckett's Waiting for Godot. He wrote of the industrial revolution, the age of scientific progress, and also, of the world that offered only profound anxiety and solitude. Rilke wallowed in the human condition.

Related Topics:
Rainer Maria Rilke - Novel - 1910 - Pessoa's - The Book of Disquiet

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~