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LORD KNOWS I TRIED, but I simply could not get into this book. While I did find the writing beautiful and came across many thought-provoking, lyrically suffused passages (especially in the first half of the book), Malte's endless rambling about his childhood or about his convoluted family history bored me to death � problem is, these bits make up SO MUCH of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, making it nearly impossible to follow.

Still, here's a fragment on female representation in art and literature I definitely wasn't expecting to find in Rilke's writings, and which really stuck with me:

We know of these women from letters that have been preserved, as if by a miracle, or books containing poems of accusation or lament, or portraits in a gallery that look at us through a sort of weeping that the painter caught because he did not know what it was. But there were countless others: those who burned their letters, and others who no longer had the strength to write them. Ancient women who had hardened, with a kernel of exquisiteness which they kept concealed. Formless women who had grown strong, strong from sheer exhaustion, who let themselves grow to resemble their husbands but remained entirely different within, where their love had been working away in the dark. Child-bearing women who never wanted to give birth and, when at last they died in bringing the eighth child into the world, had all the manner and lightness of girls looking forward to love. And those who stayed with bullies and drunks because they had discovered a way of being further away from them, inside themselves, than they could be anywhere else; and whenever they were among people, they could not disguise the fact, but were radiant, as if they spent their lives with the blessed. Who knows how many there were, or who they were? It is as if they had destroyed beforehand the words into which they might be put.