Thus Spoke Zarathustra

⚖The case for it

Camel, then lion, then child. The metamorphosis parable early in Part One is the thing readers keep and can explain to someone else, and it arrives in the first thirty pages. The book works if you read it as scripture or verse rather than as argument, which is what its admirers actually do, dipping in a chapter at a time, thoughts they say arrive “displayed with fierce and glorious fervor.” Several describe first contact as “a religious experience, which is kind of paradoxical.” Del Caro's translation restores the rhythm that older prose versions flattened, praised for how it “captures the rich sonority and hyperbolic, even bombastic rhetoric,” and readers who switched say they had been missing the sound of it.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The mock-biblical register is the complaint everyone lands on, since “the passages feel like sermons” where philosophy was expected, and the thee-and-thou cadence of older translations drives people out early. Zarathustra comes across as “a pompous...ego maniac so obsessed with how right he is,” mocking anyone who disagrees instead of answering them. The lines about women, the whip among them, get treated as a philosophical black mark rather than period flavor. Readers who started their Nietzsche here regret it, one admitting “I do not feel well-read enough to take this one on,” and tell others to read the Genealogy first, since the vocabulary is assumed rather than built. Momentum breaks in the middle third as the parables blur. “The longest short book I've ever read.”

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings