:: LANCE OLSEN ::
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Nietzsche's Kisses At once lyrical, comic, and deeply moving, 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 Salomé, his stormy association with Richard Wagner’s musical genius, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his rabidly anti-Semitic sister dedicated to assuring her brother’s legacy by distorting his philosophy into a cult attractive to the rising proto-Nazi movement. Here is an authoritative portrait of the Nietzsches we know and the Nietzsches we don’t—the one who killed off God, unmoored language from the things to which it refers, and invented the notions of the Overman and Eternal Recurrence, as well as the one evincing a fragile and hyper-sensitive intensity that contrasts eerily with the celebration of strength and the disparagement of consciousness in his own writings. His titanic 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, when it is not simply scary, sad, and haunting. Both stylistically and formally innovative, the prose in Nietzsche’s Kisses is surprising and rich. The result is a vivid, complex readerly experience of Nietzsche’s critifictional imagination, internal dividedness, and existential alienation. Yet, for all its technical and philosophical play, this book never relinquishes its profound empathy for what it means to be human during our final hours.
"It is a riveting and evocative portrait, but far more than that, it is an experience, an experience in which the reader is instantly thrust into Nietzsche's consciousness during his final hours on earth and they are hallucinatory, fantastical, tragic hours, hours not only achingly poignant, but terribly haunting. " -Nietzsche Circle "Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses has a Dionysian soul that the great philosopher would have loved. More importantly, Olsen, and the novel, understand what Nietzsche meant about the scary business of looking into the abyss." -Percival Everett "Nietzsche’s Kisses is a brilliant book and a book of brilliances, one of which follows the logic of the disintegration of a great mind with poetic grace, profound comedy, and a sense of tragic inevitability. With this novel Lance Olsen moves well beyond mere experimentalism to occupy a ground worthy of the magisterial and manic figure of Nietzsche himself. This is a deeply moving, compelling, intelligent, and utterly human account of the power of mind and the glory of post-history’s first and most vulnerable superman." -Michael Joyce |
