Rainer Maria Rilke, poet of solitude and wandering
A work that brilliantly portrays the essence of life and human existence using only imagination and fragmentary memories.
A diary-style novel filled with reflections on life, love, and loneliness.

“People are flocking here to live, but I feel like people are dying here instead.”

Born into a fallen noble family, Danish poet Malte Lauris Brygge longed for the big city and finally left for Paris at the age of twenty-eight.
But unlike his harmonious and quiet hometown, Paris in the early 20th century, as seen through the eyes of a delicate and sensitive young poet, is an absurdly large and threatening city.
Seeing women begging on the streets and people seeking refuge in charity hospitals because they cannot die, he confronts the reality of a big city where even death is mass-produced.
Malte, who ran away from the hospital without receiving treatment because he was distressed by the sight of people struggling in poverty, records the cruel landscape of the big city with despair.


"The Notebooks of Malte" is a diary-style novel based on the despair and loneliness Rilke experienced while living in Paris. It is a wonderful novel, but it is also a confession that reflects Rilke's inner self as he was evolving as a poet.
In 1902, Rilke first set foot in Paris after receiving a request to write “Studies of Rodin.”
But upon arriving in Paris, he was struck by the poverty and stagnation of this metropolis.
For here he observed and experienced meaninglessness, corruption, darkness, and rampant evil.
Based on these experiences and his lonely boarding life, Rilke wrote the excellent diary novel, The Notebooks of Malte.
The Notebooks of Malte are a record of despair born from a terrifying experience of the metropolitan environment, where quantity reigns supreme over quality, with no regard for the individual's unique life or death.
It depicts a human figure who is at a loss and constantly wanders around poverty, death, and fear.