Nietzsche's Kisses
A Novel
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
Nietzsche’s Kisses is the story of Friedrich Nietzsche’s last mad night on earth. Locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, reliving his brief love affair with feminist Lou Salome, his stormy association with Richard Wagner, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his radibly anti-Semitic sister. Here is an authoritative portrait of the Nietzsche we know and the Nietzsche we don’t. His titantic ego, suppressed, squelched, and sealed up within him, all but unknown to his acquaintances, creates a maniacal and raging giant inside his own skull that is mysterious and unnerving. Both stylistically and formally innovative, the prose in Nietzsche’s Kisses is surprising and rich. The result is a vivid, complex experience of Nietzsche’s final hours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Olsen (Tonguing the Zeitgeist) delves into the fractured mind of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900) hours before his death in a Weimar institution. In the opeining narrative, Nietzsche counts his last hours, doted upon by nurse Alwine and his righteous sister, Lisbeth ("the llama"). Alternately, there are chapters titled by body parts ("Tail," "Bowels") which offer a kind of dreamlike record of Nietzsche's memory, rendered in a stream-of-consciousness second-person. Finally, a more cohesive narrative fills in the details of Nietzsche's life and works backward in time: his travels to Italy, where he fell in love with the unattainable Lou Salome; his waning years as a professor in Turin; his first literary success with The Birth of Tragedy, championed by Richard Wagner before their falling out; finally, his youth in Naumburg and his birth as a pastor's son. Fancifully embroidering into the narrative Nietzsche's themes and aphorisms "Every sentence is a kiss" Olsen is a fine and daring writer, equal to the material.
