A masterly new translation of one of the first great modernist novels In the only novel by one of the German languages greatest poets, a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the citys untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilkes semi-autobiographical novel is a moving and powerful coming-of-age story.