Casanova in Bohemia - Hardcover

Codrescu, Andrei

3.53

123 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786243880 ISBN 13: 9780786243884

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2002

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Beloved NPR commentator and popular author Andrei Codrescu makes a stunning return to historical fiction, detailing the adventurous life and erotic times of the famed illuminist Giacomo Casanova.

In his national bestseller The Blood Countess, Andrei Codrescu brought to life the bloodthirsty royal Elizabeth Bathory, who embodied nearly all the contradictions of the seventeenth century. Now he depicts the astonishing life of the legendary Casanova, as the old adventurer relives his life while writing his memoirs in a provincial Bohemian castle at the end of the eighteenth century. Far from being defeated by age, Casanova delights in the maidservants, reacts with intellectual vigor to the unfolding of the French Revolution, and collaborates with Mozart on Don Giovanni. Long considered the rhapsodist of an age of aristocratic mirth, scandal, and innumerable affairs, Casanova was also a first-rate intellect who corresponded and argued with Voltaire and Rousseau. His published work, besides the celebrated History of My Life, includes a multivolume fantasy fiction novel that predates and anticipates Jules Verne; translations of Italian classics into French; and a number of plays that were produced on the great stages of Europe.

Casanova's romantic legend overshadowed his literary work, which was, for the most part, not published until 1960. The fate of his writings was nearly as fabulous and intriguing as that of their author. Still, even in abridged, bowdlerized, and fragmentary form, Casanova's memoirs have inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert, Stendhal, Hermann Hesse, and now, Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu's vivid fictional account illuminates the interest we still have in this uncompromising and magical libertine, while it imagines how his life would have continued if Casanova's immortality had extended beyond the literary.

In Codrescu's retelling of the Casanova legend, readers are introduced to an age far less inhibited than our own, and far more interesting in its vices. At once a libertine, a defender of women, a reactionary, a revolutionary, a brilliant observer, and a visionary, Casanova was a man ahead of his time both in thought and in action. Finally, in this inventive and absorbing work, Casanova is given due credit for his writings, his philosophies, and, of course, for the amorous magic that has been made known to so many.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work is often heard on National Public Radio. He has written and starred in the Peabody Award-winning film Road Scholar. His previous novels include Messiah and The Blood Countess. He is also the author of such nonfiction books as Ay, Cuba!: A Socio-Erotic Journey, The Devil Never Sleeps, and An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes (and What Happened Afterwards). Mr.

From Publishers Weekly:

Poet, novelist, essayist and much-admired NPR commentator Codrescu (The Blood Countess) offers a ribald history of the final years of the infamous satyr. The novel imagines Giacomo Casanova the son of an Italian actor, who began his career as a lifelong seducer of women when he was kicked out of the seminary for dallying with the nuns in the twilight of a lifetime flamboyantly checkered by peccadillo and achievement. Scarcely a year after escaping prison and still in his early 30s, he made and lost a fortune when he introduced the lottery in Paris. At the age of 60, under the nom de plume Chevalier de Seingalt, he assumes the post of librarian for Count Waldstein at Dux Castle in the kingdom of Bohemia. Arranged around an outline of European history from 1785 to the year of Casanova's death in 1798, his reminiscences evolve in a sequence of nightly visits by an intelligent, precocious and sexually agreeable maidservant, Laura Brock, and her younger protege, Libussa Moldau. Codrescu evokes (and takes liberties with) the historical events of the French Revolution and unblushingly drops the names of such icons as Franklin, Goethe, Mozart and Marie Antoinette into the mix. They are put to good, kinky use: Casanova so excites Laura with a story about an argument that he once had with Voltaire about poetry that she begins to lactate. Codrescu fans will enjoy this tongue-in-cheek patchwork of bawdy escapades.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.