Nietzsche's Kisses - Reviews

"This literary philosopher has haunted literature for a century, and Lance Olsen has decided to take a closer look at this ghost in Nietzsche's Kisses, respectful of his spirit, but only enough to bring him down to earth where one can have a better look at him...he also treats his subject with enough respect and imagination, and little enough self-consciousness, to let it speak for itself, mediated for sure, but never subordinated."

—Electronic Book Review Review

"Nietzsche is a man of many sometimes conflicting seasons and in this fascinating and structurally complex work by Lance Olsen, Nietzsche is shown the last night of his life, locked in a room, hovering between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, deliriously recalling a fraction of his seasons of glory in his dribbling impotence as we tune into a short stream of time at the end of his life, a refreshing, enlightening, disturbing, but altogether welcome accompaniment to the lore of all things Nietzsche."

—Mad Hatters' Review

"Nietzsche's Kisses is a brilliant achievement, a seamless, precise, marvelously affecting novel that must be read by everyone who appreciates the best of today's fiction."

—American Book Review

"While it's impossible to know exactly what was whirling through Nietzsche's brain-body those last eleven years of his life, let alone those final hours, Olsen's fictional account casts a few bright rays of lightning upon those moments. When recalling his years as a professor it occurs to Nietzsche as he is standing before his students that "for some people consciousness is a dangerous tenement whose rooms they should never enter alone" (109); few actually enter the dangerous realms of their consciousness, certainly not its utter and extreme limits as did Nietzsche. Most need companions along the dark road, though they only skirt its edges, never enter its depths. The abyss Nietzsche gazed into gazed back into him and it is that labyrinthine abyss which Olsen opens up to us. It is truly a "resurrection of consciousness" and that seems to be Olsen's ultimate concern as we enter the dangerous, fascinating, fabalistic rooms of Nietzsche and his numerous selves, his masks only reflecting a plethora of other masks as he remains an indissoluble enigma, a Sphinx whose questions remain forever unanswered.
Come, join Nietzsche as he dies. Lance Olsen invites you . . . And so do Nietzsche, and Nietzsche, and Nietzsche . . . Let the Bardo begin."

—Nietzsche Circle

"Olsen is a fine and daring writer, equal to the material."

—Publishers Weekly

"Olsen is known for telling strange stories in unconventional ways, and in Nietzsche's Kisses he does not disappoint. With little warning, this book's rich, sometimes oblique, prose jumps from twisted first-person images of the sanitarium to third-person vignettes of various episodes from his life to second-person stream-of-conscious rants. The sum of this is both a fictive biography and a compelling rendition of what the last day of anyone's life might be like....a book that is as smart as it is engaging."

—PopMatters

"Olsen...depicts this fallen übermensch with inventiveness and stark-raving prose."

—Time Out New York

"Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses has a Dionysian soul that the great philosopher would have loved. More importantly, Olsen, and the novel, understand what Nietzsche meant about the scary business of looking into the abyss."

—Percival Everett

"Kisses, tears, and laughter. Pride, embarrassment, and humiliation. Lance Olsen's beautiful novel gives us both the 'human, all too human' side of Nietzsche, and the dream of lightness and grace that was central to his philosophy, but that is too often forgotten or ignored by his disciples."

—Steven Shaviro