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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
superb historical fictional memoir, May 5, 2007
This review is from: The Lost Diary of Don Juan: An Account of the True Arts of Passion and the Perilous Adventure of Love (Hardcover)
In Seville, he was named Juan Tenorio, but his mother abandons him near a monastery. Nuns secretly raise and torture the child even as they train him to cherish and worship women. He eventually runs away from the nasty environs to become an outlaw. Eventually he meets the Marquis de la Mota, who teaches him to be a master spy, a master swordsman, and a master lover. He is so adept at the latter; some consider him to be a demon. Hearing word of the legend of lovemaking, the inquisitor general investigates Don, who refuses to wed even at the coaxing of his mentor as a means of saving his life. That is until he encounters the fiery warrior woman Dona Ana.
Using the device of finding Don Juan's diary to tell his story works brilliantly in Douglas Abrams' superior historical fictional memoir of the renowned lover from his perspective. By writing the saga through the journal, Don Juan becomes more than a one head joke as the audience sees a full blooded person with wants and desires that are not only in the boudoir. Interestingly when Don Juan describes a conquest (and not just with women), he waxes poetic like a romance writer. Readers will enjoy this fast-paced account of the world's greatest lover as he plunges into one escapade (and woman) after another.
Harriet Klausner
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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mesmerizing, May 7, 2007
This review is from: The Lost Diary of Don Juan: An Account of the True Arts of Passion and the Perilous Adventure of Love (Hardcover)
I found this book mesmerizing -- and at the same to have a very deep heartful side to it. It's an amazing page turner, exciting as hell, with a plot that just keeps twisting and turning so that you can't wait to see what happens next. Meanwhile, the main character, Don Juan, slowly becomes ever more real and more human. He begins as the notorious seducer of women, with an attitude towards his conquests that, no surprise, is almost cavalier. He will be with no woman more than once. He recognizes and awakens and serves their desire, but then departs. But as time and fortune have their way with him in this absolutely thrilling telling, his heart starts to open, and almost in spite of himself he finds himself falling utterly in love with the one woman he cannot seem to impress. After decades of conquests, the man whose very name has come to be synonymous with seduction for seduction's sake, comes to question how he has lived and is ready for a much greater adventure. Does he find that a single kiss in the arms of your true beloved is worth more than a thousands nights with a thousand different women? I won't spoil the story for you by giving away the outcome, but I will say this: If you have ever wondered how -- or if -- sexual liberation and monogamous commitment can go together, read this book. It's a spellbinding story that left me breathless, wanting more, and also deeply affirmed in my choice to be true to one woman.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don Juan Bites the Dust, March 26, 2010
D. C. Abrams' "The Lost Diary of Don Juan" is a novel written about the fictional character Don Juan in the context of the infamous heyday of the Spanish Inquisition - approximately in the 1590s.
What rings true here is Abrams' scathing, withering condemnation of the Catholic Church and the ruling Spanish Aristocracy, the promulgators of this medieval holocaust, where countless innocent people were murdered because of their beliefs. Well, actually, they were murdered because they did not believe in Catholic ideas and rituals.
Beyond being buoyed by Abrams' correct take on actual history, his tale of Don Juan is little more than a faux-lascivious and grossly salacious little soap opera.
What's interesting is that this author is a sexologist. Often in the dialogue between Don Juan and his female tutors (or their private thoughts), you can clearly hear the echo of a sex therapy session, where the counselor conducting the therapy has a huge axe to grind, regarding the oafishness of men as the inadequate partner in less-than-satisfying heterosexual sex-making. Don Juan instructs the reader in the proper ways to make love.
It doesn't take much "reading between the lines" to see the point: monogamy and utter and undying devotion to the woman are the only acceptable values in marriage. Further, men are almost always the culprits in bad marriages, because they do not know how to honor a woman's body and perform properly. Woman's infidelity comes from one source: the inadequate male she to whom she is married.
It's all heterosexual, pro-straight-marriage blather, enough to make a reader feel like upchucking periodically. Don Juan's only fault was that he was unable to love only one woman. Guess who, in the end, realizes his wayward past and vows to love only one woman from then on? Yuck. We need lectures (page after page of them) about this from Don Juan? The only cleverness here is that the author chose the most infamous fictional womanizer in history as the messenger of his own ideas of what constitutes correct sexual conduct.
It's a bad novel, from front to back (except for the aforementioned historical context), due to its way too obvious preaching. This is not historical fiction. It is a bad story in the context of history.
Barely a 2 on Amazon's rating scale.
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