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Books

I Am Dynamite! by Sue Prideaux

Scott Parker looks at Sue Prideaux’s (armour) penetrating biography of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The temptation for any biographer of Friedrich Nietzsche must be to begin in Turin, with the madman sobbing, his arms draped around a horse’s neck. He sinks to the flagstones of the Piazza Carlo Alberto. We learn that he is never to recover. The scene fades out, and we are whisked back to his childhood, to proceed with the tale of how the ‘philosopher of the future’ reached this breaking point. Prideaux instead opts to build her first chapter around Nietzsche’s first meeting with Richard and Cosima Wagner in 1868, when Nietzsche was an undergrad at Leipzig University.

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