Book Review - I am Dynamite - A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche - Sue Prideaux

Thus Spake Zarathustra, an impenetrable work which I started on too young and which left me with a feeling of confusion. What was this that I had read? What did it mean? Why did it feel like I had watched a film starting half-way through, where everyone else knew who the characters were except me? Thus I was introduced to the genius of Nietzsche as a young man, selecting the book on the basis of its weird cover, a 1970s penguin classic, well thumbed by my parents or taken from a second hand bookstore. I knew that the theories in the book delighted me, but I could not fully understand nor grasp the enormity of what was contained therein. This spaking Zarathustra looked somewhat like my father! What fun, but then what eye opening wonder once I started to read. With the backdrop of not fully understanding his work, this book acts as a wonderful foil, explaining the man, his life, his family. You follow his journey through a difficult world and his arrival at a place which brought the most wonderful illumination but at the same time, sent him to a place from which he could not recover. The journey is the story in this book and the author, Sue Prideaux, does a wonderful job of taking you through Nietzsche's life with the right amount of historical digging. While retaining a Mantell like narrative with a familiarity and tone which brings the character of Nietzsche to life through the page. This somehow humanizes the otherworldly figure of Nietzsche, who roams through the pages as in his life. The narrator moves from place to place, bringing down the records where they exist such as through the diaries of Cosima Wagner, but filling in the blanks where they do not. I found this approach wonderfully effective in maintaining the record. Nietzsche is not a polarising character, because there is not much to polarise around. He is neither a figure of the right nor the left, much to his hideous sisters chagrin. His thought is so profound but, as Prideaux quite wonderfully surmises at the end of the book, there is no final guiding thought within it. He simply sets out how the ship can now sail, but does not tell us where.