All for Love: A Novel [Paperback]

Dan Jacobson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 2007

The tale of a scandalous affair between a Hapsburg princess and a lowly cavalryman, it was the greatest European scandal of the day: she was Louise of Saxe-Coburg, the wife of a prince, the daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium. Her lover was Second Lieutenant Géza Mattachich, ten years younger than the princess, an undistinguished subaltern of dubious origin and extravagant ambition. Ahead of them both lay assignations, adultery, flight, the squandering of a fortune, a duel, imprisonment, bankruptcy, and madness. Shuttling between historical fact and fiction, All for Love draws on the actual diaries of Louise and Géza to paint a drama that is both comic and painful, extravagant and profound.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A chance encounter in 1895 between a princess and a debonair military man leads to a scandalous relationship in British writer Jacobson's woefully stilted 10th novel. Princess Louise, daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium, leaves her husband and embarks on an orgiastic spending spree across Europe with Geza Mattachich, a Croatian lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army, racking up debts and fraudulently securing a lease for "one of the most beautiful properties on the French Riviera," the latter giving Louise's family an excuse to imprison Mattachich and place Louise in an asylum. After long years of internment, both escape and are reunited, thanks to the unlikely help of Maria Stöger, a working-class woman who had an affair with Mattachich in prison. Jacobson, unfortunately, fails to capitalize on the story's dramatic potential and errs on the side of half-baked biography over taut narrative; footnotes and excerpts from the historical princess's and lieutenant's self-serving memoirs and other obscure reference materials clutter swaths of pages, and the prose rarely rises about lackluster. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Jacobson presents the story of an affair, set deeply within a rich historical setting: pre-World War I Europe and a social sphere accustomed to palaces and luxurious hotels. The liaison partners are actual historical figures--Princess Louise, daughter of the king of Belgium, who married into a distinguished family high in court circles surrounding the emperor of Austria, and a more-or-less no-account lieutenant in the Austrian army, Geza Mattachich. Louise and Geza breach protocol by the carelessness of their affair. The result is banishment from Vienna, being viewed as social pariahs, and enduring critical financial hardship as they roam homeless over the continent. Even incarceration was part of their new life. Using a compelling third-person narrative voice--the author peers intimately into events but reports them with an ironic detachment--Jacobson, a highly regarded South African writer, offers footnotes throughout the narrative, which reference actual historical sources, including the lovers' memoirs. That technique makes for a brilliant anchoring of imagination to authenticity. This completely absorbing novel is at once serious and humorous; it is realistic but at the same time entertainingly melodramatic. Historical fiction as true literary fiction. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Picador (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312427301
• ISBN-13: 978-0312427306
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,914,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bizzare Love Triangle, January 21, 2007

By 

Dud Avocado - See all my reviews

This review is from: All for Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

I've often heard it said that one's ability to take responsibility for one's own actions is the highest indicator of self-esteem. Don't tell that to the protagonists of this book. Certainly we the readers are entertained by their devastating choices, but it's their inability to relent in the pursuit of the inevitable consequences that fascinates. I can only liken the behavior of these people to the current exploits of Britney Spears. However, I don't think Ms. Spears is as enamored with the acting out of the dramatization of her own saga as much as Princess Louise and her erstwhile lover Mattachich. Once on top of the world, Britney is insistent on degrading herself, but in the pursuit of pleasure. For the lovers of this historical novel, pleasure never really comes into it.

I believe the book's titular "love" was never part of their endgame (sorry to disappoint!) They are two united pilgrims of imagination, seeking to discover what lies beyond the strictures of class in Hapsburg Vienna. Once they find it, puzzlingly, they don't stop. They continue on in an intractable gyre of indigence and affliction of their own making, only ending, in this life at least, in death. While on the one hand the reader marvels at their brazen, obscene commitment to finish what they audaciously start, one cannot help but ponder, was it all worth it?