Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1891274 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 364 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Sometimes intriguing, more often impenetrable, this biographical novel attempts to recreate Friedrich Nietzsche's experience of mental and physical deterioration. Following the philosopher from 1889, when he is first institutionalized in Basel, to his death in Weimar in 1900, Krell, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, constructs a bizarre first-person narrative to give voice to Nietzsche's torment and delusion in the last 10 years of his life. But it is only through Nietzsche's letters and medical records, imported into these fictionalized rantings, that we get a glimpse of the man who continuously struggled against physical ailments and self-imposed intellectual alienation. Krell tries (unconvincingly) to imbue Nietzsche's life and madness with the pathos of a Greek tragedy?a son raised without a father, thwarted in his quest for his mother's love by his sister's manipulative interference. Ultimately, readers of what might have been a philosophical and psychological high-wire act are left neither a good read nor new insights into the philosopher's contributions.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Cryptic Portrait
David Krell's avant-garde biography of the great philosopher is borderline incomprehensible as it is steeped in an impenetrable post-modern litany of obscurantist literary techniques. However, the novel is truly ambitious, as Krell attempts to tell the Nietzsche's story from the point of view of his late insanity. The result is extraordinarily unreadable and esoteric. Perhaps the one notable achievement of the work is that Krell has reproduced many of Nietzsche's original letters to friends and family and all of his medical documents recorded during his years in mental institutions. The reader is provided with a rich insight into the poor man's regression. Still, one is left with a broken storyline, undeveloped characters and scenarios, and prose that is entirely too derivative of Joyce's Ulysses.

The death of tragedy
Krell is a major translator of Heidegger who, in addition, have contributed to fine books of interpretation on Heidegger as well as Nietzsche. Krell's previous Nietzsche-outing, "Infectious Nietzsche," is a bold, inventive and challenging look at Nietzsche and the discourse surrounding body, health, and disease.

In this fictional biography, Krell once again tackles Nietzsche, covering the last years of the philosopher's life as his body and mind became ravaged by syphillis. By combining Joycean literary techniques with snippets of Nietzsche's actual letters, Krell attempts to give voice to the impossible: madness.

At the hands of any other writer, such a project would be an utter disaster (and not in any good sense) but with Krell's depth of philosophical as well as philological understanding of Nietzsche as well as the languages and the cultures that meant so much to him, this book is surprisingly poignant, stirring and haunting.

The letters which range the entirety of Nietzsche's sane life, from adolescence to the very final scribblings before madness overtook him (some such letters have stains of lunacy), reveal a tender and fragile Nietzsche, that his own persistent metaphors of laughter, dance, and war often betray. These letters also reveal the inner core of Nietzsche: his passion for life despite the ailments and personal shortcomings--why he came to write such good books.

In the end, Krell's Nietzsche is not unlike the Nietzsche of 'Ecce Homo,' the half-mad self-invented alter ego of his former self. In dissolving the very boundaries between philosophy and fiction, Krell may have paid the ultimate tribute to the legacy of Nietzsche: for what is a biography about Nietzsche anyway, but perhaps a profound work of art?

Scholar's folly
A professor of Nietzsche studies has done a most elaborate thing, he has written a novel pertaining to the last ten years of Friedrich Nietzsche's life when Nietzsche was mad. The novel of Nietzsche's breakdown speaks in Fritz's own allegedly lunatic voice and that of his mother and others. It draws upon the biographical information of the life imagining his circumstances in those last ten years. Surprisingly, the effect is lively and interesting since the book is the creation of a Nietzsche scholar.