Lost Son

Lost Son is a beautiful, poignant and moving novel, not only about the life of Rainer Maria Rilke, but also about the human struggle of the artist. Written in a style evocative of Rilke and his writing, this novel offers a poetic rendering of Rilke's journey: his wounds, his regrets, his conflicts, as well as his healing and his growth. From the outset, we see Rilke's acutely sensitive way of being: "But even at a glimpse, he looks a damaged vessel, as when he was a child. Something about him cleft bare and never closed. Twenty-six years in the world now, yet forever these countless cracks." Yet as the novel reveals, it is these precise cracks that allow for Rilke's most poetic response to the world. We also see Rilke's struggle as a poet: "the poet wrestles with the need inside him. Need that incessantly makes itself felt but cowers when he gives it leave to come forth as work." He longs to write, yet writing itself is elusive, and we see this tension in many very intriguing relationships: with his wife Clara, his muse and lover, Lou Salome, his "master" and mentor, Auguste Rodin. As he struggles to have these human relationships, he struggles at the same moment for something that perhaps for him was even more sacred: solitude. The novel captures this strange and paradoxical condition, making Rilke and his work come alive for readers in a new and real way. We feel Rilke's presence upon the pages of Lost Son; we feel that we have come to know Rilke in a deeper and more personal way. I recommend this book most highly, not only for its beautiful and poetic writing, but for its portrayal of Rilke and of the human soul.

As one who has, for many years, loved the poetry and thought of Rilke, I found this to be a remarkable novel that succeeded wonderfully in capturing both the "magic" and the "empty too much" of Rilke as man and artist.

In 1902, twenty-six-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke has received a commission to write the definitive biography of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. Accepting the work, Rainer leaves his wife and their newborn daughter behind in rural Germany seventeen grueling travel hours away from his new residence in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. The rustic writer is overwhelmed by the city with its affluence and poverty side by side. He feels overwhelmed as his childhood nightmares of being a stranger amidst strange people frighten him, but mostly he fears failure as a poet, as a biographer, and as a writer. His abandoned family females give him moments of concern, but they tie back to his childhood, which he needs to escape from and find with his poetry and with his writing peer and muse Lou Salome. This is an insightful biographical fiction of Rainer Maria Rilke, considered by many to be Germany's greatest twentieth century poet. The story line focuses obviously on Rilke from the opening baptism in Prague to his schism with Rodin in Paris, but also provides a discerning window into the artistic movements of Western Europe during the tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth century. The not chronological in order events lead to a more vivid astute look at the period, but also make it more difficult to follow the prime focus of the novel, the life of Rilke. This is an entertaining account of a poet whose haunting dark work makes many consioder Rilke as having one foot within the competing classical and another with the modernist movements. Harriet Klausner