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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More Than the Great Lover, October 16, 2008
This review is from: Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy (Hardcover)
If your name is famous or infamous enough, or if it fills some sort of lexical need, it can get used as a term of description on its own. We have been hearing a lot lately about people who are supposed Mavericks, for instance. If you call someone a Benedict Arnold, everyone will know you are paying no compliment. For centuries, lotharios have been called Casanovas, meaning a libertine who has made plenty of sexual conquests. It is only part of the picture Casanova himself gives in his massive twelve-volume autobiography, and most readers (like, admittedly, your present reviewer) have contented themselves with looking for the naughty bits and ignoring the rest. This leaves the stage open for a biographer to take the massive work, decide what can be chipped away to make for a full but accessible life story, and examine confirmatory contemporary texts to inform the reader of context. This is just what Ian Kelly has done in _Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy_ (Tarcher / Penguin). Kelly includes "lover" in that subtitle, but he does not include plenty of other categories in which the multi-talented Casanova excelled and which are included in this exciting biography: violinist, soldier, alchemist, cabalist, con-man, prisoner, fugitive, traveler, and the list goes on. Casanova was not always admirable, but he was always enthusiastic, and was a model for living life bravely, if excessively. He thus makes a fascinating subject, and a theatrical one in both senses of the word. Kelly is himself an actor, and successfully concentrates on the theatricality of Casanova's life. Indeed, his book is divided into operatic acts and scenes rather than chapters, with intermezzi between the acts to explain details about the eighteenth century versions of travel or sex habits.
The theatricality starts right at the beginning; Casanova was born in 1725 to an actress in Venice, a city literally of masks, for citizens were required to wear them from October into Ash Wednesday. All his life, if he was not himself on the stage, he was hanging out with actors, making love to actresses, or traveling with a troupe. He made his money starting up lotteries, or taking fees for his occult work within the cabala, but he was always better at spending it. There has always been a question of how much he padded his memoir and how much was sexual braggadocio, but Kelly finds corroborations for many of the episodes, including some that have previously been deemed questionable. It is likely that any errors in the memoir are due to simple and excusable lapses of memory more than to deliberate exaggeration. There would have been little need to exaggerate, anyway. What he describes in his memoir is guilt-free enjoyment, and the stories of pleasure resonate for us more than routine porn from the time for a couple of reasons. Casanova knew of men who got pleasure from inflicting pain on their partners, but this disgusted him; he had no interest in this sort of kink, or in being on the receiving end. He had little interest in coercion and almost as little in conquest. He did have some interest in homosexual encounters, but is subdued about describing them. He was repeatedly attracted to women dressed as men, and had a spectacular affair with a girl who was passing herself as a man so she could perform as a castrato on stage. He realized that he had a compulsive interest in sexual adventure, but that the thrill was only partly physical. He was sincere rather than cynical. He liked (theatricality again) the performance, the act of bringing joy and pleasure by seductive play and then moving on. His accounts of his amours are playful and affectionate: "He was a libertine on the cusp of being a romantic," says Kelly. He did not like sex unless it were linked with laughter, food, and joy. He liked intelligent women, and he liked pleasing them; he much preferred affairs to one night stands, and even his connections with prostitutes were long-term. He remained on good terms with many of the ladies after he had traveled away, sometimes leaving them pregnant. He was careful to keep their identities hidden in his memoir, although researchers have at least in some cases been able to give a name and personal history of some of the women he lists. He did not count himself handsome or well endowed, and he was frank about how he feared disappointing a lover, or losing an erection, or ejaculating prematurely.
In all, Casanova was one of the most fascinating characters in history, and we do him a disservice to use his name as a quick synonym for a mere "lover". There was far more to him. He talked with Dr. Johnson about etymology, for instance, and stayed with Voltaire, and visited Rousseau, the Pope, Ben Franklin, Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, and Mozart. He might have contributed lyrics to Mozart's _Don Giovanni_; he certainly had a box at the premiere. He enjoyed food, and may have been the fellow who started off the folklore that oysters are aphrodisiacs; Kelly points out that we should appreciate Casanova as a food writer. He made his own way, had an enjoyable time of it, made it enjoyable for others, and then turned out a memoir that is known by everyone, even if not everyone has read it. Kelly's wonderfully sympathetic but unfawning picture is full of enthusiasm for its irrepressible subject, and it gives a fascinating account of the ways of life and love throughout eighteenth-century Europe.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
much greater than the myth, October 23, 2008
This review is from: Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy (Hardcover)
This biography strips away the legend of "the world's greatest lover" to provide readers with an in depth look at a person who turns out to have been an eighteenth century Renaissance Man. With a Prelude, Introduction, Curtain Call, and five distinct acts that break the life of Giacomo Casanova into eras, the audience learns that he was a businessman, diplomat, spy, philosopher, author and translator. Ian Kelly points out the great lover wondered Europe and met the famous, the almost famous and the bizarre. Biography fans will relish this insightful look that brings much more to the dining table than just the legendary lover. Mr. Kelly brings alive the Age of Reason, the eras of no reason, and the absurd of Europe from Voltaire's France to the Russia of Catherine the Great to Casanova's hometown of Venice and his education town of Padua, amongst others. This is an excellent bio as Casanova proves to be much greater than the myth.
Harriet Klausner
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3.0 out of 5 stars
What a charmer!, December 17, 2011
3.5 stars, really. This book follows the life and sexual escapades of Giacomo Casanova, using Casanova's own memoirs as Ian Kelly's main primary source, often backed up or enhanced by other contemporary letters, memoirs, diaries, etc. Casanova's charm immediately shines through on the page, and it's hard not to like him almost instantly. He is the ultimate lovable rake, who doesn't just use and throw away women, but falls a little in love with all the women he beds and often cares for them and protects them along the way (arranging abortions, marriages, money, etc) and women often came to him for help when they had nowhere else to go (and got a bedding in the process.) Casanova, as is less well known, was also very intelligent and enjoyed discussing philosophy with Voltaire, science with Benjamin Franklin, and astronomy with Catherine the Great. The book clipped along at an exciting pace for the first half of the book, but after Casanova visits London, the books slows down a lot and becomes monotonous -- at this point Casanova is the quintessential wanderer, and the stories and people quickly begin to blend together. There are also times where you get the sense that a certain anecdote or description would have been much more entertaining in Casanova's own original words rather than Kelly's summary. I admit to skimming the last 100 pages. Despite that, I loved and was surprised by Casanova's charm, wit, and personality from this passage on: "Typical of the the young [18 year old] Casanova, his predominant emotion on entering the San Cipriano was to feel slighted by the institution in which he found himself. He was 'insulted' by the need to sit [for] an exam, insisting, correctly, that he was already a doctor [of law], and decided to act the imbecile. He was placed in a class of nine-year-olds studying grammar, until his physics master from La Salute in Venice recognized him."
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