‘I sense that to work is to live without dying…’

This book details the poet Rilke's life in Paris, with splashes of his travels outside of France.

I've only read his "Letters to a Young Poet", which is a gracious and posthumous collection of letters. This book contains not only journals and letters by Rilke, but observations of Paris, much of what would envelop and become Rilke's "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge".

Overall, this is a tidy, and quite short book, but it does contain many perceptions of Paris that are deeply interesting, especially those about death.

The overriding atmosphere in all Rilke’s communication is one of the overt presence of death, exemplified by the hospitals that he sees on his perambulations. ‘I see now why they figure so often in Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, you suddenly feel that in this city there are legions of the sick, armies of the dying, whole populations of the dead.’

I liked reading about Stefan Zweig having seen Rilke on a bus:

Zweig also recounts an earlier sighting of Rilke, when he chanced upon the poet riding the top deck of an omnibus, as if in a trance, curiously out of place amongst the other passengers. The sight of Rilke awkwardly embedded in this modern vehicle, silently passing in anonymity and unaware of his friend’s presence, had clearly touched Zweig.

And oh, the suffering paragraphs:

I know of no incantation; it is God who must pronounce it when the times are completed. I can only wait patiently. I can only bear with faith that deep source that lives on these long days sealed within me, heavy as a stone. But life is there, and it wants to use me for everything, my stone and me. So then, I am lost and I suffer…

In summary, this book was interesting but brief; I'd like to have read a bit more about the context, which to me seems faint, apart from the actual descriptions of where Rilke physically roamed Paris. The good bits were Rilke's quotes interspersed with faint information. ( )

"I am in Paris; those who learn this are glad, most of them envy me. They are right. It is a great city; great and full of strange temptations." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Ranier Maria Rilke

I was in my late 20s when I discovered Ranier Maria Rilke. Although I have revisited his poetry over the years and read biographies and books about Rilke it has been forty years since I last read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the composition of which figures in Rilke in Paris.

I opened up my copy and was amazed to find underlinings and notations and bent pages and bookmarks. How could I have forgotten this book?

"I have succumbed to these temptations, and this has brought about certain changes, if not in my character, at least in my outlook on the world, and, in any case in my life." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Ranier Maria Rilke

Rilke in Paris focuses on the writer's time in Paris. Rilke first came to Paris in 1902 as a young man. By 1926 he had died of leukemia. Betz plumbs letters and excerpts from Rilke's works to illustrate the city's influence on Rilke, forming his artistic vision, especially as related to his writing of the highly personal Notebooks.

Also included is Rilke's poem essay Notes On the Melody of Things.

The book is a concise overview of Rilke's life from the young poet seeking a mentor through his development as a writer, including his influences. I was interested to read how Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy influenced Rilke.

Beautiful black and white photographs of Rilke's Paris illustrate the text.

An entirely different conception of all things had developed in me under these influences; certain differences have appeared that separate me from other men, more than anything heretofore. A world transformed. A new life filled with new meanings." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Ranier Maria Rilke

We encounter Rilke as a solitary whose quest for authenticity separated him from others so that even when they were in the same city he only dined with his wife weekly. He believed his mentor, the sculptor Rodin when he preached that artists must give up personal life and happiness for their art. Rilke had presented himself to Rodin and was taken in, working as a personal secretary in exchange. A break forced Rilke on his own, and he took residence in Paris, and over the next twenty years, he returned to "the same Paris" between his wanderings across Europe.

Rilke spent time in the Luxembourg Gardens, observing and learning from the beauty and the ugliness he saw. I recalled one of my favorite paintings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, In the Luxembourg Gardens by John Singer Sargent, even if it was painted in 1879. I wanted to be transported into that scene.

"For the moment I find it a little hard because everything is too new. I am a beginner in my own circumstances." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Ranier Maria Rilke

I love to learn how writers work. Betz offers us a detailed look into the "Genesis" of The Notebooks. First came Rilke's encounter with the story of a poet who had lived in Paris for some time, and feeling a failure, died at age thirty-two. Rilke saw the Notebooks as a "sequel to The Stories of God." He became haunted by his imagined poet Malte. He worked on the book for years; "Prose must be built like a cathedral," he wrote Rodin.

"My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Ranier Maria Rilke
The Notebooks "is a confession and a lyrical novel of sorts, a study in psychology and a treatise on the interior life," Betz wrote, "a moving example of maturation through solitude and lucid contemplation of the loftiest problems in life." I am glad to have read Rilke in Paris for it has brought The Notebooks back into my life.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. ( )

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