Any mentally idle, story-hungry novelist or scriptwriter would do well to attend to the entangled and twisted lives of Friedrich and Elisabeth Nietzsche, which present ready-made a nearly perfect narrative. Most real lives need a good deal of cutting and pasting to get them into story shape. Here no complicated restructuring is required: you have only to start at the beginning and go on to the end (Friedrich's ending before he ended; Elisabeth's continuing long after her demise) and you have as rich a tale of human relations and mental worlds as any reader or viewer could stomach.

LRB 25 September 2003 | PDF Download