About me: YOU ARE VIEWING IMAGES FROM THE WORLD OF THE NOVEL, LOST SON. PLACE YOUR CURSOR OVER A PICTURE TO READ ITS CAPTION.ABOUT LOST SON:
In 1902, commissioned to write a study of the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin, twenty-six year old poet Rainer Maria Rilke arrives to live in Paris, having left his wife and newborn daughter at home in rural Germany. The bustling metropolis overwhelms the young poet's senses, and the rampant squalor of the Latin Quarter soon touches off a crisis of deep personal dimensions. Not since Rilke's disastrous childhood has his world seemed so menacing and strange. Sorely disquieted by poverty, loneliness, quailing health, and fleets of dark memories, Rilke finds himself caught up in a powerful reckoning with his "unfinished childhood" and the tangled relationships that came of it, his wife and daughter clearly included. Meanwhile the great master Rodin, unshakable in his commitment to transform every fleeting problem into the enduring stuff of art, becomes an almost god-like ideal. But can Rilke become a master himself, or will the moral cost be too great? His crisis in Paris will determine his path both as poet and human being for years to come.
An intimate, imaginative portrait of one of the most uniquely sensitive artists of the modern age, LOST SON reveals Rainer Maria Rilke as child, lover, husband, father, protege, misfit soldier and wanderer. Here is the author of Letters to a Young Poet in the grip of his greatest artistic struggle: life itself.
LOST SON, appearing in bookstores everywhere June 2007. For more, visit the author's literary blog:
Thank you for stopping by; the book looks highly absorbing. I became enamoured with the exemplary prodigal son through the haunting Duino Elegies - advancing my consciousness towards ‘the open’. I may dress entirely in black and carry a single long-stemmed iris through the streets if I pick up a copy.
I adore Rilke. Thank you for the Add Request, and pardon my not saying anything sooner. I anticipate this work, almost as much as I do the deceased RE's "Wilde." Wilde and Rilke, and Lorca, are three prominent influences, them and Dorothy Parker and Djuna Barnes! :-D Have a lovely night.
Thank you. My sister changed my life when I was 16 by giving me a beat up copy of "Letters...". RMR's words are, and have always been, the words I live by.
One of my all time favourites..
a thousand translations exist..
His gaze, from the constantly passing bars,
Has grown so weary that it can hold no more.
To him it is as if there are a thousand bars,
And beyond those thousand bars, no world.
The gentle slink of his powerful, supple stride,
Turning in on itself in ever-smaller circles,
Is as a ritual dance of strength around a center
In which a great will stands paralyzed.
Occasionally the curtain of his pupils
Will silently rise, admitting an image.
Passing through the tense stillness of his limbs,
It plunges into his heart and is no more.
Greetings M. Allen and thanks for finding me! I can't wait to get a copy of this! Lou Salome may have been Rilke's greatest love and inspiration but it was Rodin who truly made him a poet.
