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Nietzsche: A Novel (S U N Y Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

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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.

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?

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.

How anyone finished this book is beyond me. Stream-of-consciousness modernism became a literary cliche many decades ago, but it still survives to provide swanky intellectual cover for authors like Krell, who are unable to tell a compelling story. The flouting of sexual taboo is another tedious literary cliche, yet Krell attempts to use it as his meal ticket, with ridiculous effect: see his speculations about young Nietzsche sitting on his father's lap during a piano lesson and feeling an erection in Daddy's pants. Is this "novel" vile or simply ludicrous? Don't waste your time or money trying to decide which.