I Am Dynamite!

by Sue Prideaux Faber 464pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche – the subject of this complex, often hilarious biography – was “very, very odd”, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Born in Saxony in 1844, Nietzsche (pictured) was an “improbably precocious” child and secured a professorship, at the University of Basel, aged 24. But his “driving force” as a young man was his devotion to Richard Wagner, whose disciple he became. The composer exploited the relationship to entrust menial tasks to Nietzsche: for instance, he asked the philosopher to buy his silk underwear. In time, the two fell out – mainly because of Wagner’s suggestion, upon discovering that Nietzsche was losing his sight, that excessive masturbation was to blame. There followed several years when Nietzsche lived as a stateless vagrant, becoming ever more impoverished and writing books that few people read. Finally, in his mid-40s, he “went mad in a Turin piazza, throwing his arms round the neck of a horse and refusing to let go”. Ironically, it was at this point that his work “suddenly, belatedly, found an audience”.

Nietzsche’s ideas were initially taken up by the avant-garde in Berlin and Paris, and then “appropriated by the Nazis”, said Ray Monk in the New Statesman. In the latter’s hands, his concept of the “superman” became associated with Aryan racial superiority, while his idea of the “will to power” was used to justify militarism. These were misreadings, but they seriously damaged Nietzsche’s standing – for many years British philosophers didn’t think he was worth studying. Fortunately, that’s no longer true: his place in the canon is secure, and the literature on him is “enormous”. Is there room for yet another biography? Indeed there is. Prideaux doesn’t ignore Nietzsche’s ideas, but concentrates on the story of his life, which “has never been better told than in this riveting book”.