First Impression Friday will be a meme where you talk about a book that you JUST STARTED! Maybe you’re only a chapter or two in, maybe a little farther. Based on this sampling of your current read, give a few impressions and predict what you’ll think by the end.

Synopsis:

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.” So begins Rilke’s only novel, the brief, haunting Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. First published in 1910, it has proven to be one of the most influential and enduring works of fiction of our 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 lurks 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 resonant pages of the novel, which pre-figures the modernist movement in its self-awareness and imagistic immediacy. As Rilke wrote after the book was published, “Poor Malte begins so deep in misery and, in a strict sense, reaches to eternal bliss; he is a heart that strikes a whole octave: after him almost all songs are possible.

William H. Gass has contributed an introduction to accompany Stephen Mitchell’s powerfully fluent contemporary version of this great book.

Happy Friday everyone! That’s another workweek in the books! I hope you are all ending the week on a high note. Thankfully, I haven’t encountered many challenges at the office this week despite the Taiwanese regulatory audit. It went smoothly because I barely communicated with the auditors; it was our Taiwanese colleagues who took charge of everything. Nevertheless, I hope your work week all went smoothly. I hope you were able to accomplish all your tasks for the week. Otherwise, I hope you will be able to find the time to rest and relax during the weekend. For those who are caught in the crossfire in Israel and Palestine, my prayers are with all of you. It is my fervent wish that the two states will find a peaceful resolution to their decades-old conflict.

Oh. Today is the last Friday of October, which means we are inching ever closer to the inevitable end of 2023. Before we know it, we will be welcoming a new year. On the way home, I passed by a Christmas Tree lighting event accompanied by a fireworks display. The signs are there: Christmas season is just around the corner. Oh, how time flies. I hope the rest of the year will be kind and overflowing with blessings and positive news. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy in the coming year. Before diving into the weekend, let me cap the workweek with a fresh First Impression Friday. My literary journey across Latin America has come to a close. With one end comes a new beginning. I have now commenced a journey across Europe.

My first stop for this literary journey is gay Paris, a city that has become a dream for everyone, including the primary character in Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I have long been curious about Rilke but his oeuvre is comprised primarily of poems. Imagine my delight when I learned he did write a couple of prose. The most substantial of which was The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, making literary scholars consider it his only novel. Originally published in 1910 in German as Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, its first English translation carried the title The Journal of My Other Self.

Rilke’s only novel, however, does not feel like one. Refusing to conform to the strict writing conventions, the book came in the form of a journal; if the title is not a dead giveaway. It has no plot and was a meandering account of the titular Brigge’s daily experiences and observations while living in Paris in the early twentieth century. The story was comprised of fictionalized ‘notebooks’, diary entries, or journal fragments. The novel also contained autobiographical elements. Both Rilke and Brigge were married and traveled to Paris. Brigge, an affluent Danish, traveled to Paris to write about French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

While in Paris, both men also wrote letters to their wives. Some portions of the novel were based on actual letters that Rilke sent his wife. However, the book was not strictly autobiographical, particularly the flashbacks to Brigge’s childhood, such as his trip with his father to the house of his grandfather, Count Brahe, shortly after his mother’s death. In his journal entries, Brigge talked about his environment; the book was welling with vivid descriptions of Paris. But it was not all glitz and glamor. We read about the sick, poor, and desperate Parisians. The people in the lower rungs of Parisian society somehow fascinate Brigge who, at 28, felt empty. Interestingly, he is living an impoverished existence in Paris.

In his notebooks and flashbacks, two worlds collide. One was of comfort and opulence while the other one reeked of squalor. In his new world, Brigge spent his time reading poetry in the national library. He revels in being surrounded by people who lose themselves in the book they are reading. I am halfway through the book and it can be challenging to make sense of the rambling narrative structure. However, I must say I am enthralled by the writing. Every sentence was poetic, the language beautiful, an antithesis of some of the tension-filled scenes in the story. While the story meanders, I am hoping for a sort of eureka moment toward the end of the novel. It is not necessarily cathartic but I hope that it will tie all loose ends together.

As the book is rather short, I am confident I will be able to finish the book over the weekend. How about you fellow reader? What book or books are you taking with you for the weekend? I hope you get to enjoy them. Again, happy weekend everyone!