Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography

Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography

A personal glimpse into the life of one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers covers his involvement with the existentialist movement and false accusations associating him with Hitler and Nazism British journalist Lesley Chamberlain chronicles the extraordinary year, 1888, during which the expatriate German philosopher wrote three of his greatest works: Twilight of the Idols , The Antichrist , and Ecce Homo . More fundamentally, Chamberlain reclaims Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) from cliché, replacing the misogynist, protofascist madman of myth with a vulnerable human being--proud, lonely, an avid walker and eater--who questioned all received wisdom in his effort to give men and women their freedom. Chamberlain's elegant text is passionately personal, buttressed by careful scholarship. She succeeds admirably in her goal "to befriend Nietzsche." Chamberlain is the author of a book titled The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe (1990), and now she is the author of a beautifully written and powerfully analyzed biography of Nietzsche. She centers the work on Nietzsche's final years, which he spent in Turin, tired and alone. But he was a solitary traveler, except that his body was finally giving up to the relentless encroachment of syphilis. Two years after arriving in Turin in 1888, after his great mind slipped into dementia, he would be dead. Chamberlain's Nietzsche is not the fanatical bigot who received his just deserts in his final insanity but rather a brilliant person who struggled with his frailties and found inspiration in them. Her discussion of the relationship between Nietzsche and the Wagners and the break in their friendship is extremely enlightening in many ways, and the examinations of Nietzsche's works, particularly of The Antichristian (also The Antichrist ) and Ecce Homo , will correct many popular views. A gem of a book to start off the new year. Bonnie Smothers A vivid, shrewd, and above all engrossing exploration of Friedrich Nietzsche's last works and days in Switzerland and Italy. Nietzsche's life as a writer began in the early 1870s and lasted only until 1888. In that final year the long-term effects of syphilis and perhaps an inherited neurological condition robbed him of his faculties, leaving him demented, then physically incapacitated and completely dependent on his unscrupulous sister until his death in 1900. Much of this last productive year was spent in the Piedmontese city of Turin, where Nietzsche lived frugally as a lodger in the home of an Italian family. Eventually, he collapsed in the street. Chamberlain--a British journalist, contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and author of several books, of which this is the first to appear in the US--takes for her theme this painful last year. Her book is part biography, for it looks at the philosopher's intimate personal life--his preoccupation with the Wagners, his sexual failures and frustrations, his money worries and loneliness, even his close attention to diet--and part cool intellectual inquiry. She offers thoughtful and often original commentary on the four books that Nietzsche wrote during 1888 (among them Ecce Homo and Twilight of the Idols) and deftly interweaves his philosophical with his personal concerns. But above all, Chamberlain offers a tightly focused and elegantly written book whose prose style itself reflects and embodies Nietzsche's own views about the interpenetration of language and thinking. It is a significant accomplishment. Just when you thought Nietzsche had been swallowed whole by academe, along comes a writer who returns him to the public life of the mind. It is an event to be savored. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. ...[an] excellent account of Nietzsche's last days ... She succeeds to a surprising degree in communicating a sense of the man and the thinker, in all his strangeness. -- The New York Review of Books , John Banville What the reader comes away with from all this is an understanding of the connection between Nietzsche's personal experience and his most famous ideas.... -- The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt