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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and Poetic but not Compelling, October 22, 2000
By A Customer
In light of today's widespread sexual promiscuity, Giacomo Casanova's 132 reported seductions are less than shocking. The legend of this infamous Italian lover, however, rages on, fueled by the replication of his 12-volume memoir which runs more than 4000 pages in length. Giacomo Casanova was more than a lover; he was an author, an actor, a priest, a translator. In her book, Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women, Lydia Flem, a Belgian psychoanalyst and critic, outlines Casanova's life in eighteenth-century Venice, not to paint yet another lurid portrait of one of the world's most famous lovers, but to prove that he was also one of the world's most misunderstood. When Casanova was only a year old, his actress mother left him in the care of his grandmother while she performed on the London stage. When he was eight, his father died. Alone and abandoned, Flem sees Casanova's nomadic, pleasure-seeking life as a search for the parental comfort he was denied. She further characterizes him as a man in search of an identity. Admitting he was the son of actors never really furthered Casanova's desires; he invented a noble lineage for himself and christened himself the Chevalier de Seingalt. True to our expectations, Casanova learned the art of seduction at a very early age. He was eleven and training for the priesthood in a seminary when Bettina, the sister of a priest, seduced her obliging victim. Deciding the priesthood was not his true vocation, Casanova returned to his native Venice and fell into bed with two sisters at the same time, an act that was to set the stage for his later bizarre-but-comical affairs. The love of his life, we learn, was a woman named Henriette, a cross-dresser who enjoyed passing herself off as a castrato. And, there was the charming girl Casanova made love to and nearly married, the daughter of one of his girlfriends, who just happened to be Casanova's own daughter as well. But, Flem tells us, despite his steamy adventurousness, Casanova retained an air of modesty. His own memoirs are draped in staid and proper eighteenth-century euphemisms, tinged with an ecclesiastical touch: he tells us how he "conquered the ebony fleece," "got close to the altar frieze," and "performed the gentle sacrifice." Flem does not view Casanova as a traditional womanizer par excellence; she sees him, instead as a sentimental, the epitome of gentlemanliness, a lover of life whose greatest desire was to share his happiness (as well as his intellectual pursuits) with women. That's believable enough, but Flem, however, seems to take her analysis a bit too far. "There is not a trace of misogyny in Casanova," she writes. "Women are his masters. The feminine so fascinates him that he would like to merge with it." This is a little difficult to swallow since Casanova, himself, called the independence of women a "source of great evil," and said he'd rather die than give up his manhood. Casanova lived a long life and eventually even this master seducer had to deal with the specter of old age. He did so most admirably, spending the final years of his life as a librarian in a Bohemian castle and devoting thirteen hours per day to the creation of his memoirs. Surprisingly, it is through his writing, along with his thinking, reflecting and remembering, that brought Casanova his greatest joy. Although his contemporaries urged him to publish his memoirs before his death, Casanova steadfastly refused to do so. He did, though, believe that it would be through his words that he would secure lasting happiness as well as his own place in history. Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women is an interesting and poetic, if not completely compelling look at one of history's more flamboyant and lovable figures. Flem, though, seems to have fallen into the trap of over-analysis; she seems to be reaching for meanings that just weren't there. Casanova's words regarding women apeak for themselves: "One-third...," he writes, "made me laugh, one-third gave me an erection, one-third gave me food for thought." It is too bad this extraordinary man never found the one woman who could give him all three.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful Analysis of a Misunderstood Man, November 22, 2001
This review is from: Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women (Paperback)
Lydia flem provides a refreshing account of the, often misunderstood in North America, Giacomo Casanova. She bases her study on Casanova's autobographical History of My Life which he wrote while exiled from Venice in a Bohemian castle. In many ways casanova was a romantic and an intellectual. he loved the good life, enjoyed aesthetic pursuits, was a violinist, writer, poet and even dabbled in medicine. he was also the contemporary of Mozart and was born in the city of Vivaldi (another misunderstood venetian who was exiled from his native city). Most significantly, Flem stresses the fact that casanova was more of a feminist than a womanizer. He did have affairs with plenty of women, surely (and why anyone should object to that is a mistery). However, he appreciated women, treated them as equals and only sought mutual pleasure. The misunderstanding comes from the notion that he only sought sexual pleasure. No, he was witty, spoke several langauges and his comapny was welcomed throughgout the courts of Europe. he was also a bit of a Robin-Hood and, like most fun-loving and charming people, spendthrift and unconcerned with financial matters. This is the account of a charming personality. There is much to learn form Casanova, and I admit I purchased the book with thge original intent of sharpening my own seductive techniques. I found them, in fact, extremely effective - especially with intelligent ones (mostly from eastern europe) just as Casanova did.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hypnotic and Masterful!, August 19, 2000
Casanova. The word denotes a charming but unscrupulous libertine, a man without a soul whose love-making is really a well-disguised hatred of women. And for those of us old enough to remember Bob Hope's movie "Casanova's Big Night," the word also conjures up bedroom farce and foolish swordplay. Wipe all that from your mind. In Lydia Flem's stunning interpretive biography, Casanova emerges as a complex and learned man of deep feeling, kind, generous, questing. Oh yes, he was devoted to beautiful women and craved sex, but the women he was drawn to had to be witty and intellectual or he couldn't delight in them. And his enjoyment was not at all callous, for the relationships he treasured incorporated "lightness, cheerfulness, and reciprocal pleasure," according to Flem who also says that Casanova was anything but a misogynist. "Never to harm a mistress, never to arouse her anger of disappointment, never to make her suffer from their affair in any way--that is what he consistently aspired to." Flem's short but intense, savory book is in effect a brilliantly poetic gloss on the massive memoir (Histoire de ma vie) Casanova was able to begin writing at 64 thanks to his lifelong habit of keeping journal notes, letters and copies of letters. He wrote it in the "third act" of his life when he'd "thrown away or squandered everything he once owned. He [had] no woman, no fortune, no house, no homeland." In his time, he'd been a friar, a law student, a physician, a translator, a magician, an alchemist, a publisher, a theatrical impresario, an orchestral violinist, a mine inspector, an author, a spy, the co-creator of Europe's first lottery, and of course a lover of many women, often more than one at a time, and occasionally in family groupings: sisters, or mother and daughter. Casanova had "a stubborn taste for happiness." He lived for pleasure, particularly to give it, and the paths thereto were as multifarious as the bizarre, colorful twists and turns in Casanova's picaresque life. He was extravagant with his lovers, showering them with whatever luxuries he could afford--clothes, jewels, banquets--entertaining them in high style. Enormously well-traveled and exiled from his Venetian home, he belonged to "that vast country without frontiers where people speak and think in French: the Europe of conversation and gallantry." But as all that eventually slipped away from him, he realized that through language, he could turn himself into a work of art, into something immortal. By writing his memoir, he would "make his life an insolent demonstration of the reality of pure pleasure and, even more insolently, of the enduring existence of happiness in remembrance." This witty, cultured, and sensitive man had a very strange childhood. Plagued with massive nosebleeds that threatened his life, he'd been ignored by his actor parents who believed him to be a "quasi-imbecile." Yet once this bleeding was cured (by witchcraft, perhaps?), he blossomed into a precocious scholar who could charm adults with repartee in Latin. Still, the virtual abandonment by his parents always rankled and as Flem sees it, he sought to be dazzling on the world's stage so as to constantly earn his mother's favor, and enjoyed flouting authority as a way of perpetually thumbing his nose at his father. These two imperatives animated everything he did, along with a need to cover up his commonplace background. These conclusions and Flem's other observations about Casanova do not in any way reduce him to a psychological schematic--rather, she interprets his rich life with depth and acuity, making him glow. In an age of "pathographies" which sketch the decline and fall of notable people in as much grim detail as possible, what a delight to encounter a biographer who doesn't just love her subject, but revels in him and his world. Weaving in short but powerfully apposite excerpts from Casanova's 12-volume memoir, Flem not only takes you for a journey into a man's soul, but opens up the people and manners of the wildly extravagant middle and late 18th century. The writing in Casanova is so ravishingly beautiful that it's a shock to remember you're reading a translation from the French. Equally as surprising is the fact that the author is a psychoanalyst and yet instead of jargon, Casanova is filled with poetry. This is a sumptuous and dazzling work, a feast of a book and easily one of the most entertaining and revelatory biographies I've read in years. Lev Raphael, author of LITTLE MISS EVIL, the 4th Nick Hoffman mystery
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