Posted on 06/22/2008 6:56:16 PM PDT by forkinsocket
What is Casanova's biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story, just as no one setting out to describe his extraordinarily restless life could have read, travelled or written more than Casanova, or thought more about the business of living than he did, or lived as bravely or as excessively.
The Histoire, which Casanova wrote at the end of his days when he was working as a librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, details with such wit, candour and style his peripatetic years as a priest, con-man, cabbalist, violinist, soldier, alchemist, prisoner, fugitive, gambler, intellectual, writer and lover, while inadvertently giving such a vivid picture of mid-18th-century Europe, that not only is there little for anyone to add but due to its sheer bulk - over 3,800 pages, making up 12 volumes - the beleaguered biographer must rather choose what to take away in order to make his own version a reasonable length.
Casanova has baffled and thwarted many of those writers who, while trying to describe and evaluate his experiences, have succeeded only in repeating in edited form the events as he tells them, but in Ian Kelly he has at last found his Boswell. Himself an actor, Kelly is immediately alert to the theatricality of his subject.
Born the illegitimate son of a Venetian actress in a city where it was mandatory to be masked from October to Ash Wednesday, Casanova lived a life shaped by the slipperiness of the masquerade and the playfulness of the theatre. It is as a player of parts on the great European stage that he describes himself in his Histoire.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
“much later he would enjoy his own daughter in the same bed as her mother.”
What a guy. /s/
“. . .lived as bravely or as excessively...”
Ah, such a brave, wonderful pig.
The only consolation is that he found out that little bit of information AFTER the deed.
Casonova’s ‘History of My Life’ is considered one of the best literary works of the 18th century. He was consultant to Lorenzo Da Ponte on the libretto of Mozart’s opera ‘Don Giovanni’. By his affair with his daughter Leonilda, Casanova was the father of his own grandson, who inherited a dukedom from Leonilda’s impotent husband. When he found out that Leonilda was his daughter he withdrew his offer of marriage, but later when her husband proved impotent she asked her father for assistance ... or so the story goes ...
It is a classic, no doubt.
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