From Publishers Weekly
This is the second major work on Kierkegaard to appear in recent years; Alastair Hannay's intellectual portrait Kierkegaard: A Biography approaches the religious philosopher's life and work in a thematic fashion, discerning behind the veils of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings his anxieties and hopes, failures and successes. Garff, associate professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, proceeds very differently in this biography, portraying a philosopher whose daily life formed the crucible in which his landmark works were written. Drawing not simply on Kierkegaard's most famous writings, Garff also examines in microscopic fashion the minute details of the Dane's life year-by-year from his birth to his death. Garff uses journals, letters, gossip and family conversations to present the portrait of an intense young man whose study of the philosophy and literature of his day turned him into both a romantic and an anti-romantic, a Christian and a rebel against Christendom. For example, Garff points out that Goethe's Faust heavily influenced the young Kierkegaard, as did his participation in a circle of friends who discussed romantic literature. Although some will accuse Garff of revealing salacious details of the philosopher's life—as in the chapters on Kierkegaard's relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen—this monumental and magisterial biography offers fresh glimpses into the sometimes-tortured life and work of this true philosophical genius. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Much has changed since a prominent nineteenth-century cleric dismissed the writings of Soren Kierkegaard as "blasphemous toying with what is holy." But while generations of serious readers have learned to treasure the Danish thinker's profound meditations on the modern meaning of Christian faith, many have remained captive to the earliest caricatures of Kierkegaard as a hunchbacked and melancholy hypochondriac. Thanks to a gifted translator, English-speaking readers at last can share an acclaimed Danish biography that liberates Kierkegaard from those caricatures, even as it establishes the vital links between his tempestuous personal life and his epoch-making works. Garff allows readers to see, for instance, how Kierkegaard deliberately primed himself for his literary-religious mission by severing--at the cost of intense self-laceration--the only romantic tie of his life. In a similar manner, Garff connects the tensions in Kierkegaard's relations with his own father to the theological drama of Fear and Trembling. An acute critic, Garff discerns Kierkegaard's deeply private and psychological motives for pressing toward martyrdom in his implacable warfare against Christendom's complacent ecclesiastical hierarchy. But he also keeps in view the larger historical context, one in which Karl Marx was asking his own revolutionary questions about the role of religion within a rapidly industrializing world of commodity capitalism. A biography that illuminates an often-misunderstood mind. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Publishers Weekly
" this monumental and magisterial biography offers fresh glimpses in the sometimes tortured life and work of this true philosophical genius".


Jonathan Lear, Times Literary Supplement
"For any readers of Kierkegaard, this book will have a theatrical effect Written with confidence and verve [A] page-turner".


Gordon Marino, The Wall Street Journal
" is a superb portrait of the philosopher that offers drama, psychological insight, and social history".


Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor
"His beautifully written and translated biography is scholarship at its best".


Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun
"Kierkegaard is the Nabokov of philosophers. His literary bent is everywhere in evidence".


John Updike, The New Yorker
"Garff's informal voice enlists us in the village gossip of Kierkegaard's time".


Book Description
"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied." Søren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come.


About the Author
Joakim Garff is Associate Professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of numerous books and articles and is the coeditor of a project to publish definitive new Danish-language editions of all of Kierkegaard's writings. Bruce H. Kirmmse is Professor of History at Connecticut College. His previous works include "Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark" and "Encounters with Kierkegaard" (Princeton). He is the chairman of the editorial board of "Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks" (Princeton, forthcoming).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life—the intriguing secret of all the machinery—will be studied and studied." Soren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history.

Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought—books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism—but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancee Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured.

Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly