Nietzsche: A Novel (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

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.

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?