NONFICTION - Nov. 21, 1993

ALFRED NOBEL by Kenne Fant, translated by Marianne Ruuth (Arcade Publishing; $24.95: 352 pp.). Lifelong bachelor Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and founder of the prestigious prizes that bear his name, lamented in 1888 that “in my case, Cupid’s arrows have been inadequately replaced by cannons.” So it seems: the one true love of his life, whom he met at 43 and to whom he wrote the complaint quoted above, married another, leaving Nobel free to continue his obsession with building explosive factories all over the world. Nobel was proud of inventing dynamite (nitroglycerin safely absorbed in a porous silicate) and blasting caps (to detonate the nitroglycerin) in the 1860s, but he reserved his real genius for business: he knew just what his inventions were worth, pursed patent cases to the bitter end, kept firm control of his innovations, and used other people’s money to fund his company’s expansion. For all his success, though, Nobel was not a happy man: author and director Kenne Fant (like Nobel, a Swede who moved to France) paints him as lonely and isolated--and so shocked at being called a “merchant of death” in 1888 that he resolved to fund a peace prize. It would be nice to learn more from this biography about Nobel’s intentions regarding the prize, and what he might think of their current status, but Fant sticks closely--too closely--to his subject’s quotidian, letter-filled life: he reprints innumerable notes from Nobel to his mistress, and we learn as much about Nobel’s investment in his brother’s oil business in Russia as about Nobel’s own company. Alfred Nobel makes for interesting reading nonetheless--though Nobel himself never would have deigned to, believing that those who read biographies are “naive or fatuous.”