Somewhere a window smashes; I hear the laughter of the larger shards and the sniggering of the splinters.
Rilke’s only novel, and you can kind of see why he was never troubled for another one. The first half is electric:
The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.
It’s the kind of fragmentary writing I love, presented as the entries in two notebooks of a man living in Paris at the turn of the 20th Century, town becoming city, mechanisation obliterating the past, people living closer together in greater numbers than ever before. Not a place for a sensitive young man from foreign countryside.
There is a creature that is perfectly harmless if you set eyes on it; you hardly notice it and instantly forget it. Should it somehow get into your ears unseen, however, it begins to evolve, and hatches, as it were; there have been cases where it made its way into the brain and flourished there, with devastating effect, like the pneumococci in dogs that enter by the nose. This creature is your neighbour.
He hates it. He is poor, lonely and becoming mentally ill. The prose lurches between beauty and disgust on a Baudelairean scale:
the laughter oozed from their mouths like pus from open wounds.
It’s inventive, peculiar, beautifully observed and reported. And then, around halfway through, the book shifts to recollection of his past, reaches for something strange and numinous, doesn’t quite grasp it, and descends into dull childhood reminiscence – nobody finds childhood that interesting except you -and a sort of “pale boy on fainting couch” whimper.
But that first half – fantastic stuff.
Here was the dark myth he left void, prepared against his death.
THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, Rainer Maria Rilke (UK) (US+).