The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge

The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge are recognised as one of the greatest prose writings in modern European literature. The German author of a Czech origin wrote The Notebooks during his sojourn in Paris between the years 1904 and 1910. The ficticious diaries of the Dutch aristocrat Malte L. B. reflect spiritual and existential position of a young artist against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world. The creative endeavour of the directors approaches the analogies between a European man’s consciousness in the first decade of the 20th and the 21st centuries. The protagonist is typified by his efforts to come to terms with European cultural heritage, for which the notion of following the tradition is innate yet which is at the same time characterised by its tendency to define itself in opposition to it. The author also captures the anxiety stemming from the unfathomable discrepancy between the deeply familiar world of his childhood, which is experienced as continuously absent, and the anonymity of the contemporary cosmopolitan city. The text anticipates the associative structures of the greatest pieces of modern literature, for which reason it does not offer a coherent linear narrative but is rather a poetic sequence of images. Although The Notebooks are often said to be the author’s only novel, given its structure and lexical means of expression, the term “poem in prose” would seem much more apt.