Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

Baudelaire forms the link onto this chapter on Rilke’s ‘prose-book’, where his experience of Paris is given fullest expression and where the French literary tradition is everywhere present. Malte is read as in dialogue with decadence, especially with Huysmans’ À rebours. It is understood as a ‘poet’s novel’ in the sense that its techniques, preoccupations, and structures are not those of the novel as they are commonly understood, and make more sense when approached as a kind of prose poetry with connections to Baudelaire’s. There is also an extended comparison with Hamlet, as a way of elucidating the novel as a work of crisis, with its hero poised between ruin and revelation.