Customer Reviews

Nietzsche's Kisses: A Novel

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This is a beautiful and unflinching work, carefully gorgeous in its language and human insight without once groveling for sentimentality. Every page houses another poem of a line ("my mother's love voice telling me that history always happens in the future"), which means that while this book can be read while maintaining 90 RPMs on a recumbent stationary bike, it should not be. Nietzsche breathes in this book, perhaps even to an extent he didn't permit in his own writing, and the ghost his breath keeps bated is Hitler himself. Until finally making an official appearance in the penultimate chapter, Weimar and the Reich haunt three massive sections of the tale, hinting at a future Germania that would extend beyond Nietzsche's life and be all he despised. He would've hated what was done to his work (his corpus-corpse) "after," and that gives this fiction an air of momentous inevitability. There's no beginning and no end: if mortality doesn't get you, the publishers will. This is a smart and lovely piece that dismisses despair in favor of...breath.

I really had fun reading this book. The chapters alternate between different narrative structures, all of them used to get at Nietzsche's psyche at the end of his life from different angles. Readers who know Nietzsche and a few things about his life will probably find it more interesting than those who don't. But the book has great energy. Its structure may be experimental, but its style and attitude are very accessible.

"Nietzsche's Kisses" is many things. Of course, it offers an overview of Nietzsche' life and ideas, but it is also a thorough exploration of perspective and the constitution of self in memory--hinging upon a fervent intensity of experience--and a remarkably successful exercise in stylistic and formal experimentation. Olsen has always been a great stylist, but the prose here has a crystalline radiance that sets it apart even from the rest of his work, as lucid as it is versatile.

Not only that, Nietzsche himself is surprisingly sympathetic, and rendered impossibly well. In a text so aesthetically intense, the immense presence of this living, breathing individual was simply sublime.