From Publishers Weekly
Born to an aristocratic family in imperial Russia, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) became a well-known writer in Europe and real-life muse to the likes of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud. Von der Lippe, a Norton senior editor who translated Salomé's memoir of Rilke (
You Alone Are Real to Me), defines Lou by her relationships to the men around her: a doomed first love with a married clergyman, her fraught friendship with psychologist Paul Ree, the one-sided relationship with Nietzsche (who proposes marriage twice), her dramatic but sexless marriage to translator Friedrich Carl Andreas, her great love and long correspondence with Rilke, and her later involvement with Freud's circle. In capturing Lou's voice, von der Lippe uses stream-of-consciousness spiked with overripe metaphor ("How much of us does the world hold? No more, I think, than those words inscribed in the blood of memory") and odd tics (characters repeatedly say each other's names during exchanges). A framing device —a woman named Anna Kane writes Lou's life and wonders about Lou's connection to Anna's grandmother—feels unnecessarily tacked on and leads to a contrived twist at the end. Lou's correspondence with Rilke has just been published by Norton; interested readers should start there.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The author provides a less-than-dazzling fictional biography of Lou Andreas-Salome, a Russian emigre writer who sustained intense relationships with three of the most intellectually complex men in turn-of-the-century Europe. Though a poet and an author in her own right, it is through her intimate associations with Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud that her life story is recounted. Set against the backdrop of an intellectually stimulating, yet ultimately foreboding, European era, Lou's life would seem to provide enough remarkable material to draw readers into the heady orbit in which she lived, loved, and traveled. Perhaps Von Der Lippe is too close to her subject--she translated Andreas-Salome's biography of Rilke--to get past the superficial and delve into both Lou's psyche and soul. Though scholars may be intrigued, casual readers will probably take a pass on this retelling of Andreas-Salome's life.
Margaret FlanaganCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
