Joakim Garff calls Søren Kierkegaard a mysterious figure “with whom one is never really finished.” Mr. Garff carries on an epic struggle with his subject – often providing astute observations and correcting the efforts of earlier biographers – but in the end Kierkegaard defeats him as well. And although Kierkegaard adepts and connoisseurs of philosophers’ lives will find Mr. Garff’s book of considerable interest, Alastair Hannay’s “Kierkegaard: A Biography” (at half the length of Mr. Garff’s) will do for the general reader.

What makes Kierkegaard such a trial for the biographer? Well, he was a tease, inventing pseudonyms and constructing elaborate framing devices for his work involving fictitious editors and other characters to whom he attributed words of his own devising. The man became, in effect, his own ghostwriter.

Kierkegaard is the Nabokov of philosophers. His literary bent is everywhere in evidence. As Mr. Garff puts it, Kierkegaard cannot work through his grief without “perfecting his pen.” In other words, everything Kierkegaard wrote was for effect. Or, as one observer told him, “You are so polemical through and through, that it is quite frightful.”

But even here there is a problem, since the source is Kierkegaard, who is quoting the dying words of his philosopher-friend Poul Moller. For good measure, Mr. Garff adds: “In a marginal note he appended to this remark, Kierkegaard expressed doubt as to whether it was in fact on his deathbed that Moller had uttered the words about being polemical.”

I am not a fan of deconstruction, but there is a case to be made that Kierkegaard is nothing but a series of texts that advance and then renege on what they say. Kierkegaard is to be relished for the histrionics of his texts. “What caught Kierkegaard’s attention was Moller’s literary dramatization of philosophical problems – the text as theater or as rostrum,” writes Mr. Garff.

Who is to say when the philosopher is fooling? His contemporaries had the same problem. He told Hans Christian Anderson how much he admired Anderson’s work – and then published a book attacking it. Kierkegaard’s sheer perversity can be quite annoying, and his biographer has trouble making him out. While staying at an inn, Kierkegaard frightened the chambermaids when they entered his room. “Apparently he was able to do something with his eyes,” the biographer comments lamely.

Shortly after this passage, Mr. Garff confesses:

To the dismay of the biographer, Kierkegaard cannot be pursued “historically.” He has left behind nothing but fragments and scattered traces, and indeed it seems as if, from the very first moment he put pen to paper, he adopted free, fictionalized production as his preferred mode.

Undaunted, Mr. Garff carries on for another 700 pages!

If Kierkegaard cannot be apprehended historically, this leaves only the circularity of his own texts, and it is this literary character that the biographer portrays. While this approach yields considerable understanding of Kierkegaard’s work, the project of biography is ruined.

As in his text, so in his life: Kierkegaard was a dissenter. He loved picking quarrels not only with the established church and other writers but also with himself. “Either/Or” is a perfect title for a Kierkegaard book because it so eloquently expresses the dividedness of human nature.

Kierkegaard ridiculed philosophers like Hegel, who sought some grand unity in nature or history. It seemed to be his mission to explore the radical subjectivity of thought as the only (and paradoxical) way of sur mounting subjectivity.

Mr. Garff presents Kierkegaard as entirely self-invented:

“After my death,” he wrote in a famous journal entry, “this is my consolation. No one will be able to find in my papers one single bit of information about what has really filled my life: they will not find the inscription deep within me which explains everything, which often makes what the world would call bagatelles into events of enormous importance to me, but which I, too, view as insignificant when I remove the secret note that explains everything.”

This note, in which Kierkegaard wrote what really took up his life, would be a wonderful thing to have. But it does not exist – not because Kierkegaard has removed it, but because it is unlikely that he ever wrote it. And perhaps this was the secret: that there was in actuality no secret at all, and that therefore literary invention was required. … In the hunt for the real Kierkegaard people frequently overlook the fact that mystification, mummery, and fiction are constitutive features in Kierkegaard’s production of himself – and that this is precisely why these things help reveal the “real” Kierkegaard.

This fascinating diagnosis occurs on page 101, and the rest of this biography qua biography cannot get beyond the point.

And would it be so wonderful to discover the “secret note”? Mr. Garff senses that Kierkegaard is once again teasing. What would the note prove? It would merely be yet another Nabokovian gloss on the elusive concept of the real. What note could “explain everything”? Quite aside from the unreliability of Kierkegaard himself, there is my biographer’s insistence that no subject can really know everything about himself. Otherwise, we biographers would have to go out of business.

Kierkegaard, the man, remains as elusive as Shakespeare, the man. Indeed, I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poem:

Others abide our question.
Thou art free.
We ask and ask – Thou smilest
And art still.
Out-topping knowledge.