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Rating: 
Summary: Only three people have reviewed this?
Review: First: this is one of those books that if you know it exists, you have almost a moral obligation to read. The way Rilke manipulates the mind/thinking of Malthe.... to observing and commenting on the city is amazing.... the world he lives in is haunting because of the ways in which he views it..... Aside from that, this is a poetocal masterpiece which even in English translation can hint at how language should be put together and structured. It is clear, it is lucid, and it is beautiful. And it is one of only a few books that should be called a must-read....
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Summary: The Gift of Many Levels of Meaning
Review: I was extremely disappointed in this version. The translation by M. D. Herter Norton is much more eloquent. Save your money and buy that one instead.
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Summary: The Failing Light of Inspiration
Review: If you read this at the right time of life no other book will ever be more important to you. I read it when I was 19 and for me that was the right age. Rilke's Notebooks contain what amounts to the crisis of modern existence. For Rilke the solution was writing some of the best poetry ever written. If you want proof read it. For Malte it was not so clear yet and his struggles will be very familiar to any student of the arts. As a time piece this also has much value. It records the change over from the old Europe to the new. For Malte, as it was for many of Mann's, Musil's, Broch's... characters, this proves devastating. Identity threatening. The second half of this book is not as good as the first half but I'll take that first half and disregard the rest. Read this while reading Rilke's greatest contribution to our world, his poetry.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: One of the great novels of the twentieth century -- moving, beautiful, strange. Not until I reread this a few years ago did I realize that I had been stealing from this book for my whole writing life.
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Summary: Like finding a shining gem inside a dark cave
Review: This book can be quietly savored by fellow introverts which is what Rilke obviously was. As you read, you can feel Rilke's poetic soul seeping through the character of Malte Brigge as he looks out at the streets of Paris and knows there is another version of reality underneath the mere appearances. I felt the fruitful and rich gift of solitude as I became immersed in the hypnotic flow of this poetic and secretive masterpiece.
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Summary: I cannot believe no one has had to rave about this yet!
Review: This is the only novel written by Rilke. It is a difficult text, often vaguely referencing obscure Medieval history. It has endnotes to help you through it though. It is entirely worth the effort to read this book (too many books don't make you try these days) because it is unlike anything I have ever read. Rilke places you in the mind of Malte, an unusual, beautiful and intensely profound universe. This novel is, I believe, an epic poem under the guise of a journal, and it's one of the best poems written.
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Summary: An intellectual goldmine...
Review: This proto-existentialist novel features a main character (Malte) that is frightened by the possibility of faceless-ness; that is, he is terrified by the collapse of a coherent subject/identity in modernity. This work is highly critical of the traditional narrative where everything occurs in a logical and temporal order that is coherent and teleological. Through the character of Malte, Rilke illustrates the decay of such an understanding of one's self and the chaos that results. Rilke read a lot of Nietzsche prior to writing this book, and many of the same themes Nietzsche contemplated in The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra are reworked by Rilke in this novel. It is my interpretation that Rilke was trying to work out a theory of modern, fragmented, existential subjectivity and then offer some way to make such a life livable. Rilke explores such themes as memory's transience, unpredictability, and instability, the role of a God in a world after the "death of God", and a dissolving of the conceptual categories between the self and the other, or the inside and the outside, all play into this fascinating book. The book is written in notebook form, which plays into the notion of fragmentary identity and problematic narrative. Entries jump from the past to the present to imagined futures in an often random and chaotic order. There is no "plot" to speak of, although there are bits and pieces of narratives, but nothing sufficient enough to create a comprehensible 'Malte'. All the while, you are in the mind of a character that is trying and failing to make sense of it all (to 'impose' a narrative). The later Martin Heidegger always lauded Rilke (despite Rilke's being too metaphysical) for being able to express ways of interacting with the world that were non-humanist. He was especially interested, and wrote significantly about, a passage (p. 46 in the Vintage paperback edition) where Malte imagines a house and its inhabitants from a single mutilated wall that is left remaining. I'm not too sure what his relation to the text as a whole was, so I'll leave it at that. This book is an intellectual paradise and is rich in treasures as long as you are willing to look for them.
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Summary: it really is a novel
Review: though it seems to be a collection of strange lyric essays moving from simple snapshots to fantastic recollections and musings. There are seeds planted early that expand and flower, painfully and beautifully and so truthfully. This is what books should do for people. Every sentence, as foreign as it can seem, you've known all your life, and you see it now in words. I don't know anything about german, but this translation is incredibly beautiful, I cannot imagine the original could work any better than this. There is no desire to move forward, you move through the pages and can't imagine having to look up. Blah blah and more blah, its really good.
Rating: 
Summary: unpleasantness
Review: [....]Loving another does not entitle one to their love in return, but being loved by another does place one
under an obligation. This is the awful truth that Rainer Maria Rilke's semi autobiographical hero,
Malte Laurids Brigge, seems to be trying to evade. In fact, this is very much the dilemma of modern
man, for no matter how much we love God, our love will not necessarily influence Him, but His love
for us places us under an obligation to Him. Of course, the easiest way out of this dilemma is simply
to deny the existence of God, which has been the response of Modernity. Unfortunately, this still leaves the problem of fellow humans, and the obligations that their love puts
us under. Thus, Rilke, who wrote the book after running away from his wife and young child, says of
Brigge : [H]e had decided never to love, in order not to put anyone in the terrible position of being loved. Or, as Sartre more famously said : Hell is other people. Both quotes reflect an understanding that love ultimately places limits on human freedom, by creating
interdependence. Brigge's/Rilke's reaction, one which has been all to common in our age, was to turn completely
inward and become totally self-absorbed, to disregard others. And in the absence of God and of other
people what is the central fact of the self ? Mortality. So it is little surprise that an obsession with
death thoroughly permeates the Notebooks. If you really want to read about an effete and morbidly
self-centered intellectual who is down and out in Paris (of course Paris), this is the book for you. But if you don't share in the pathologies, it's likely to be off-putting, at least it was for me. [The beauty of Rilke's language]
certainly does not redeem the depressing story. Rilke's concerns are those you would expect of the
man that Michael Dirda describes above : only his own unpleasant self. In the end the book is mainly
interesting as an influential expression of a philosophy of mere existence that has proven enormously
damaging, contributing mightily to the unfortunate atomization of humanity in the 20th Century. GRADE : D
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