The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel
About this audiobook
A stunning, revelatory new translation of the only novel from one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
A groundbreaking masterpiece of early European modernism, originally published in 1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge unspools the vivid reflections of the titular young poet and nobleman. From his Paris garret, Brigge records his encounters with the city and its people, muses on his family history, and lays bare an alternately exquisite and grotesque atmosphere of death. With a poet’s attention to language, Rainer Maria Rilke forges a dazzlingly visual coming-of-age narrative, kaleidoscopic in its approach to time and its portraits of Parisian life.
“Among the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke’s contemporary translators” (Washington Post), Edward Snow zeroes in on the potent precision and astonishing, musical clarity of Rilke’s prose. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge confronts strikingly contemporary concerns of authorship, empathy, and the differences between appearances and reality, remaining an urgent achievement more than one hundred years after it was written.
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is considered one of the greatest poets who ever wrote in the German language. His most famous works are Sonnets to Orpheus, The Duino Elegies, Letters to a Young Poet, and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. His collected works include hundreds of other poems, essays, plays, and stories.
Edward Snow received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for his Rilke translations. A professor at Rice University, he lives in Houston, Texas.
Simon Vance, a former BBC Radio presenter and newsreader, is a full-time actor who has appeared on both stage and television. He has recorded over eight hundred audiobooks and has earned fifty-seven Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, including one for his narration of Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini. A multiple Audie finalist, Simon has won Audie Awards for The King's Speech by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan, and The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. Winner of the 2008 Booklist Voice of Choice Award, Simon has also been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009.
