Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography

This work follows the life of Nietzsche's final year prior to falling victim of insanity that was likely brought on by Syphilis. It chronicles that final year when the philosopher who ultimately fell in love with this city and would be the setting for his unfortunate demise. From his flat he'd write a stream of letters to his friends and his sister Elizabeth while during daily outings he'd take in all the sites the city had to offer, including the local theatre in which he'd become attached to a number of plays that were currently being shown.The book almost reads like a novel and is recommended for both the casual reader and the more scholarly oriented.

Lesley Chamberlain redefines Nietzschean scholarship. This is a breakthrough work that I very much doubt will see any scholars follow after soon. In one fell swoop she has left behind the stale, dry academicians and given Nietzsche heart, mind, soul and breath. We come to know Nietzsche through her feeling, piercing, brilliant gaze. It is one of the most intelligent, brilliant works of its kind that I've ever read. It is Nietzsche unmasked, Nietzsche revealed, Nietzsche understood in a way that others only dreamed of accomplishing.Lesley Chamberlain is a supremely talented thinker, and writer, who has written a definitive masterpiece for understanding Nietzsche.

lesley chamberlain begins her biography of nietzsche by saying that she writes to befriend him. how far then is one expected to read before dispelling the expectation of a séance? or is she being intellectually coy with reference to uncanny coincidences between the subject matter of ibsen's Ghosts and details of nietzsche's life? cold, austere nietzsche, mountain dweller, who in later years, chamberlain tells us, knew strindberg--perhaps their knowing involved a `befriending'?in his final years of sanity, nietzsche lived in turin, what we may call his dream city. in turin he could hear music and walk among architecture from the 17th century. in his own words, "But what a dignified and serious city it is! It has nothing of the capital city, and nothing modern, as I feared: it is rather more a residence from the seventeenth century, which had the court and the nobility, and a single prevailing taste in everything..."it was in turin his health improved, where he was to get work done, completing Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Gods, and The Antichrist.and it was in turin where his good friend, lesley chamberlain, described events of his life. her emphasis is on family influences and family substitutes, her choice of discipline is psychology. the death of the musically inclined pastor father a few months before young nietzsche turned five; the household of spinster women, the widow who never married, a couple of aunts, a maternal grandmother, and elizabeth, his sister, younger than he by two years, privy to all that psychic estrogen, born in july the same month their father died, oh how historians regret not knowing more of their early years together, how psychologists regret freud resisting a study of the nietzsche children; and the search for a father figure and an object of erotic desire.the apotheosis of the nietzschean quest was reached in his meeting the wagners at the time, prior to their marriage, they were an adulterous couple. oh, but what a couple, cultured, passionate, intelligent, wagnerian music was paradigmatic and cosima was gracious and beautiful and sexually attractive. chamberlain describes how even after nietzsche broke free from the spell of richard wagner, that he was never completely free, from richard or cosima, the woman to whom in the years bordering sanity and insanity nietzsche wrote never posted love letters, addressing her as his wife.enduring physical pain for most of this life, and psychic pain, he developed a regimen of travel and diet and exercise, and writing of overcoming negative values especially when masked as positive values. chamberlain shows us the pastor's son who proclaimed the death of god, the musician never as good as his father figure, the ex-soldier unhappy with german politics, and the man who loved his mother and sister so much, that even as he wandered from place to place, symbolically he never left his mother's home, nor stopped listening to his sister. in biographies favoring nietzsche, elizabeth has been sacrificed for the sake of clearing her brother's maligned reputation as all around bad guy. maybe she loved him beyond posterity, hateful as that makes her seem, especially when she married a man who expressed interests not in the best interests of her brother.nietzsche, complicated stuff, as a writer and as the subject of biography, chamberlain does bring a couple of insights. we read too much into his strategies to overcome, what she refers to as his needing to prove he was a man. well, nietzsche was a man, mercurial in moods, desirous and lonely, wanting sexual gratification from all the wrong women, the married cosima, the intellectual ascetic lou salome, and settling for prostitutes. he could say that god was dead, that values needed to be evaluated, and show us how tough he was, but he could not go beyond the shame and guilt of getting sexual activity where he found it available, and that failure ultimately may had shortened his working years, happy or not.

I have to say that I have never been able to make any sense of Nietzsche's so-called philosophy, and this book, despite all the author's admiring efforts, has been no help. Its descriptions of Nietzsche's life in Turin are somewhat interesting, but there is less of that than of long-winded, incomprehensible apologies for Nietzsche's works. The chapters on N's relationships with Wagner are repetitive and endless.I am interested in Nietzsche because of his influence on European history. This book is no help in that direction; it tends to say that N had important influence on this or that, but fails to explain how or why. A more helpful reference is "I am Dynamite--A Life of Nietzsche," by Sue Prideaux, which is a an interesting and well-written biography. But as far as I know, a good study of N's influences on history and literature still remains to be written.