The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was Rainer Maria Rilke’s only novel. It was written while Rilke lived in Paris and was published in 1910. The novel is semi-autobiographical and is written in an expressionistic style. The work was inspired by Sigbjørn Obstfelder’s work A Priest’s Diary and Jens Peter Jacobsen’s second novel Niels Lyhne of 1880 which traces the fate of an atheist in a merciless world.