Casanova's Icosameron, Or, the Story of Edward and Elizabeth: Who Spent Eighty-One Years in the Land of the Megamicres, Original Inhabitants of Proto [Paperback]

Jacques De Seingalt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1986

After a shipwreck, Edward and Elizabeth find themselves in the center of the earth and live for eighty-one years with the small humans they find there.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

So closely is Casanova's name associated with his adventures, real and imagined, as libertine and seducer that one can forget he was first of all a writer, quite apart from his Memoirs. Here, only now appearing in English two centuries after its publication in French, is his single venture into fiction, abridged from its original five volumes. Very much an example of Age-of-Enlightenment utopian literature, it tells of the wondrous revelations of Edward and his sister-wife Elizabeth, who return to their native England in 1615 after an absence of 81 years dwelling among the Megamicres of Protocosmos in the interior of the planet. In a land where love is all and flood, famine, war and slavery unknown, the couple spawns 40 pairs of twins who, in turn, people their universe. Flying horses, mechanical music, quasi-electrical telegraphy, a language, a religion and a philosophy are components of this tale in which Casanova displays wide learning and vivid imagination as well as a modicum of narrative skills. Though not a major work of its kind, the tale is certainly worth bringing to light.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Jenna Pr (March 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0941752003
• ISBN-13: 978-0941752008
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,767,786 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Little-known work by a well-known author, July 14, 2005

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wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Casanova's Icosameron, Or, the Story of Edward and Elizabeth: Who Spent Eighty-One Years in the Land of the Megamicres, Original Inhabitants of Proto (Paperback)

Jacques Casanova De Seingalt is best known as a lover, seducer, and autobiographer. I was surprised to find that he was a writer of other works as well. The Icosameron, a story told over twenty days, is a remarkable example. It's a fictional account of a brother and sister's eighty-year stay in a strange civilization on the inner surface of a hollow Earth.

Much has been said about Casanova's seventeenth century foretelling of self-powered cars, poison gas, and other modern creations. There is also much to say about how his notorious promiscuity shapes this fiction. Brother/sister coupling is taken for granted, for one thing. For another, the natives lactate but nursing is a daily and necessary exchange between adults. I can only imagine how the author wished daily intimacy of similar kind for himself.

I was more interested in other points, however. One was the clockwork regularity of the world. For the human visitors and their descendants, that included annual child birth, accurate down to the day, to the one day shared by mothers and childbearing daughters of whatever generation. I suppose you could call it their combined Labor Day and Mother's Day. Though otherwise inattentive to the women, Casanova noted that the men made competent midwives - partly because of the women's Edenic ease of birth, and partly because all the women were otherwise occupied. The narrator's own wife repeated this annual feat forty times, bearing healthy twins each time. It was a staggering feat of fecundity, and one repeated in the early generations of their descendants.

Casanova also seemed to take it as natural that humankind would colonize and dominate this world, despite its incumbent population. The women's rapid-fire fertility was almost a divine intervention to ensure rapid replacement of the natives. Along those lines, the narrator also introduced gunpowder and guns to this Eden. Nominally, they were used only to drive the snakes out of the fruit trees and gardens (!). The author took a miserly glee in the sheer mass of his arsenal, however, despite lack of other targets. It is dismally easy to foresee the human invaders turning those guns against their native hosts, in the imperialistic tradition of the time.

This book earns Casanova's inner world a place beside Erewhon, Utopia, and the many lands that Gulliver traveled. It combines satire with wishful thinking to capture the spirit and thinking, not just of the author, but of his whole time.

//wiredweird