Nietzsche

Sometimes intriguing, more often impenetrable, this biographical novel attempts to recreate Friedrich Nietzsche's experience of mental and physical deterioration. Following the philosopher from 1889, when he is first institutionalized in Basel, to his death in Weimar in 1900, Krell, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, constructs a bizarre first-person narrative to give voice to Nietzsche's torment and delusion in the last 10 years of his life. But it is only through Nietzsche's letters and medical records, imported into these fictionalized rantings, that we get a glimpse of the man who continuously struggled against physical ailments and self-imposed intellectual alienation. Krell tries (unconvincingly) to imbue Nietzsche's life and madness with the pathos of a Greek tragedy--a son raised without a father, thwarted in his quest for his mother's love by his sister's manipulative interference. Ultimately, readers of what might have been a philosophical and psychological high-wire act are left neither a good read nor new insights into the philosopher's contributions. (July)