A Book for All and None

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between
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Walter is Beatrice's alpha-male husband, a power-hungry, philandering construction mogul who makes suspicious deals in the Middle East. And around this captivating trio, there is the mystery of a rumour Raymond is a withdrawn Oxford don and Nietzsche expert who discovers love and life when he meets Beatrice, who is considerably younger than him and works on Virginia Woolf.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None - Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

And around this captivating trio, there is the mystery of a rumoured link between Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf Every single strand is fascinating and fully realised, and yet Clare Morgan somehow manages to weave them together into a dazzling, thought-provoking whole. Kindle Edition , pages.

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  1. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.
  2. Conversations about Birth, Death, and Reincarnation.
  3. A Book for All and None;

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Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jun 27, Kirstie rated it did not like it. Unfortunately not my cup of tea. Just not my style - found the lack of speech marks annoying and in all honestly it was too academic for me. I felt like a thicko reading it as it all went over my head! DNF - gave up after 75 pages which is hugely rare for me to finish. Jul 25, Mark Rice rated it really liked it.

This was a frustrating book in many ways. Right from the start, Clare Morgan showed her mastery of descriptive prose. The story, however, failed to stir up my interest. While this task demanded admirable academic rigour and creativity, the old-fashioned style This was a frustrating book in many ways. This was the case for pages: Then a change happened. From out of the blue came a chapter of such poignancy that it set all my senses alight.

Morgan's description of how Love came to Earth, helped by her cousin Chaos, is steeped in myth and majesty. The writing here is neither old-fashioned nor modern, but timeless. The chapter is nothing short of captivating.

I wish I could say that the rest of the book maintains a similar level of brilliance; it doesn't, although from that point on the story is more consistently engaging. There are flashes of spectacular prose, especially when describing Nietzsche's dark moods and uncompromising beliefs. The parallels between the modern-day characters who often act as the story's narrators and the historical figures are cleverly written.

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There are, however, too many loose ends for my liking. Leaving a plethora of loose ends flapping in the wind, though, is lazy writing that fails to leave the reader with an enduring sense of satisfaction. I'm happy to have read the book. I'm better off for having done so. If Clare Morgan had spent more time distilling the story to its essence, weeding out stuffy, unnecessary formalities and sticking to the spellbinding prose of which she is capable, this could have been one of the greatest books ever written.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email required Address never made public. Kate Webb is a critic and journalist. Nobody Knows My Name: The Artist in a Totalitarian Age. Conversations about Eleanor Marx: Kennedy, Serious Sweet - Spectator. The eternal recurrence , found elsewhere in Nietzsche's writing, is also mentioned. The embrace of all of life's horrors and pleasures alike shows a deference and acceptance of fate, or Amor Fati.

A Book for All and None: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The love and acceptance of one's path in life is a defining characteristic of the overman. Faced with the knowledge that he would repeat every action that he has taken, an overman would be elated as he has no regrets and loves life. Opting to change any decision or event in one's life would indicate the presence of resentment or fear; contradistinctly the overman is characterized by courage and a Dionysian spirit. The will to power is the fundamental component of the human identity. Everything we do is an expression of the will to power.

The will to power is a psychological analysis of all human action and is accentuated by self-overcoming and self-enhancement.

Clare Morgan, A Book for All and None – TLS

Contrasted with living for procreation, pleasure, or happiness, the will to power is the summary of all man's struggle against his surrounding environment as well as his reason for living in it. Many criticisms of Christianity can be found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra , in particular Christian values of good and evil and its belief in an afterlife.

The basis for his critique of Christianity lies in the perceived squandering of our earthly lives in pursuit of a perfect afterlife, of which there is no evidence. This empiricist view denial of afterlife is not fully examined in a rational argument in the text, but taken as a simple fact in Nietzsche's aphoristic writing style. Judeo-Christian values are more thoroughly examined in On the Genealogy of Morals as a product of what he calls "slave morality".

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Noteworthy for its format, the book comprises a philosophical work of fiction whose style often lightheartedly imitates that of the New Testament and of the Platonic dialogues, at times resembling pre-Socratic works in tone and in its use of natural phenomena as rhetorical and explanatory devices. It also features frequent references to the Western literary and philosophical traditions, implicitly offering an interpretation of these traditions and of their problems. Nietzsche achieves all of this through the character of Zarathustra referring to the traditional prophet of Zoroastrianism , who makes speeches on philosophic topics as he moves along a loose plotline marking his development and the reception of his ideas.

This characteristic following the genre of the Bildungsroman can be seen as an inline commentary on Zarathustra's and Nietzsche's philosophy. All this, along with the book's ambiguity and paradoxical nature, has helped its eventual enthusiastic reception by the reading public, but has frustrated academic attempts at analysis as Nietzsche may have intended. Thus Spoke Zarathustra remained unpopular as a topic for scholars especially those in the Anglo-American analytic tradition until the second half of the twentieth century brought widespread interest in Nietzsche and his unconventional style that does not distinguish between philosophy and literature.

The critic Harold Bloom , writing in The Western Canon , criticized Thus Spoke Zarathustra , calling the book "a gorgeous disaster" and "unreadable". This irony relates to an internal conflict of Nietzsche's: The first English translation of Zarathustra was published in by Alexander Tille. Thomas Common published a translation in which was based on Alexander Tille's earlier attempt.

Common's poetic interpretation of the text, which renders the title Thus Spake Zarathustra , received wide acclaim for its lambent portrayal. Common reasoned that because the original German was written in a pseudo- Luther-Biblical style , a pseudo-King-James-Biblical style would be fitting in the English translation. The Common translation remained widely accepted until more critical translations, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra , were published by Walter Kaufmann in , [10] and R.

Hollingdale in , [ citation needed ] which are considered to convey more accurately the German text than the Common version. Kaufmann's introduction to his own translation included a blistering critique of Common's version; he notes that in one instance, Common has taken the German "most evil" and rendered it "baddest", a particularly unfortunate error not merely for his having coined the term "baddest", but also because Nietzsche dedicated a third of The Genealogy of Morals to the difference between "bad" and "evil".

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The introduction by Roger W. Clancy Martin's translation opens with criticism and praise for these three seminal translators, Common, Kaufmann and Hollingdale. He notes that the German text available to Common was considerably flawed, and that the German text from which Hollingdale and Kaufmann worked was itself untrue to Nietzsche's own work in some ways. Martin criticizes Kaufmann for changing punctuation, altering literal and philosophical meanings, and dampening some of Nietzsche's more controversial metaphors. Graham Parkes describes his own translation as trying "above all to convey the musicality of the text".

The book inspired Richard Strauss to compose the tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra , which he designated "freely based on Friedrich Nietzsche". The work ends with a setting of Zarathustra's roundelay which Delius had composed earlier, in , as a separate work. Another setting of the roundelay is one of the songs of Lukas Foss 's Time Cycle for soprano and orchestra — Carl Orff also composed a three-movement setting of part of Nietzsche's text as a teenager, but this work remains unpublished. The short score of the third symphony by Arnold Bax originally began with a quotation from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Latin American writer Giannina Braschi wrote the philosophical novel United States of Banana based on Walter Kaufman's translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra ; in it, Zarathustra and Hamlet philosophize about the liberty of modern man in a capitalist society.

The plot covers similar topics that Friedrich Nietzsche covers in his writings.