'Enthralling'
The Daily Mail
'sparkling'
The Independent
'magnificent' The Times
‘Casanova dazzles once again, and so, too, does his biographer’
***** The Mail on Sunday.
'in author Ian Kelly, after two hundred years, Casanova has at last found his Boswell'
The Telegraph
‘Enthralling...Casanova is stripped bare...a wonderful read....pulsing with testosterone, energy and a determination to strip Casanova’s story of historical and cultural assumptions and return, via archival research all over Europe, to the man himself.’
The Mail on Sunday
‘captivating...in Kelly’s hands the story makes for a thrilling read’ The Sunday Times
'it is difficult to imagine a juicier or more engaging guide to life and love in the 18th century'
The Daily Mail
‘Ian Kelly has taken on a tremendous challenge and produced a great blast of a book, packed with energy and information, marinated in sympathy and understanding, and rippling with enthusiasm right down to the final footnote.’
The Daily Telegraph
‘He explores how Casanova revolutionised the way people view themselves as sexual and social creatures, and argues that he created ‘a modern sensibility of what it is to be a fully rounded man, alive to failures, fears and foibles, and very much attuned to a sexual motive force’.’
Mail on Sunday
'enjoyable, illuminating, Kelly has written an adult book, or I should say one for grown-ups' The Spectator
‘An unexpected pleasure is the book's focus on food’
The Telegraph
'The great strength of Ian Kelly's new biography is that Kelly, himself an actor, is so attuned to the 18th century habit of mind which cast the world as a stage...and sets Casanova's wanderlust at the heart of the story..following his trail around Europe's archives to fill in the details, corroborate or correct Casanova's must mistrusted memoirs; it is impressive work'
The Spectator
'Kelly has a fine way with libertines and dandies...he approaches his subject with a healthy appetite for food and sex and provides a fresh angle on Casanova as a gastronome'
The Independent
'We are the richer for [this] balance between exuberance and misery; as Kelly writes, Casanova's story asks us all 'to live a little more fully''
The Independent
'Casanova continues to seduce because he brought more to sex – and sex writing, than the mere act; Ian Kelly captures this aspect of Casanova perfectly'
The Spectator
‘Lots of sex then, but lots of everything else, too...crowded with incident. Rather than the shallow seducer of popular imagining, Casanova’s appeal is as a man – flawed, humorous, engagingly self-deprecating – whose vast appetite for life still acts as a tonic on those who come to know him. Kelly conveys all this admirably, and his book makes an excellent introduction to a complex and surprisingly modern life’The Financial Times
‘Kelly brilliantly communicates Venice’s cultural importance and fashionability during Casanova’s time’ The Mail on Sunday
'incredibly impressive in every way – and endlessly entertainining' Clive Anderson Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4
Casanova: philosopher, gambler, lover, priest
Last Updated: 12:01amBST22/06/2008
Frances Wilson reviews Casanova: Philosopher, Gambler, Lover, Priest by Ian KellyWhat 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.
Casanova preferred his women to smell of cheese
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.
Accordingly, Kelly shapes his biography around not chapters but dramatic acts and scenes, with refreshing intermezzi where he pauses to discourse, in true Enlightenment fashion, not only on Casanova's involvement in the Cabbala, the 'fusion of Gnosticism, Egyptian mathematics, neo-Platonism, Judaic mysticism and personal revelation' by which he was so mysteriously intrigued; but also on his means of travel (important in terms of sex-on-the-road), his love of food (equal and analogous to his love of women), and his attitude to women (most appreciated when they smelt of cheese).
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To focus on the women. Between the age of 16, when he lost his virginity, and his late forties, when he lost his potency, Casanova slept with around 130 of them, which works out at an average of four a year. This may or may not seem a great deal for a man who never married or stayed in one place for too long, but Kelly argues that Casanova deserves his place in history not because of the quantity of bodies he enjoyed but because of the guilt-free quality of the enjoyment as he describes it in his memoirs. The Histoire 'posited firmly, for the first time in the Western canon, the idea that an understanding of sex - with all its irrationality and destructive potential - is key to an understanding of the self'.
Behind the masks, Casanova's 'self' emerges as a complex affair. His first sexual encounter was with a pair of sisters whom he enjoyed simultaneously; much later he would enjoy his own daughter in the same bed as her mother. While he was uncharacteristically cagey about his genuine homosexual encounters, he was particularly drawn to women who dressed as men - at one point embarking on a dizzying affair with a girl disguised as a castrato disguised as a girl.
The manner of Casanova's affairs suggest that he was busy avoiding pain as much as pursuing pleasure; he behaved, as Wordsworth would say, 'more like a man /Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved'. He would become emotionally attached and then sharply detach himself: his need to leave was as strong as his need to love. What is striking is how repetitive his affairs were, as though he were performing the same scene again and again. At one point, years after a liaison with a nun he calls by the pseudonym MM, he meets another nun and he calls her MM too.
An unexpected pleasure is the book's focus on food. Casanova loved eating; 'sex is like eating and eating is like sex', he wrote, and Kelly speculates that he may be the originator of the reputation of oysters as an aphrodisiac. He was born into the 'last great age of Venetian cooking', he liked his macaroni sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and during his final years, while he mouldered away in Dux Castle, 'A day did not go by', a friend observed, 'that he did not have a quarrel, over his coffee, over his milk, his plate of macaroni on which he insisted…'
Kelly's narrative loses its momentum only once, in his disappointingly flat account of Casanova's spectacular escape over the leads of the Doge's palace, where he was imprisoned for 'a question of religion'. But because this particular scene was Casanova's party piece - even his enemies admitted that he told the story brilliantly - and the crowning achievement of his life, perhaps it is best that the biographer does not steal the show.
Ian Kelly has taken on a tremendous challenge and produced a great blast of a book, packed with energy and information, marinated in sympathy and understanding, and rippling with enthusiasm right down to the final footnote.
Casanova
Review by Andrew Miller
Published: June 30 2008 06:09 | Last updated: June 30 2008 06:09
Casanova
By Ian Kelly
Hodder & Stoughton £20 416 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16
Casanova is one of the great brand names of the 18th century: everybody knows him. He enjoyed a measure of fame in his own lifetime, if only because he showed up so unignorably in so many places. But his reputation was made decades after his death with the publication of Histoire de ma Vie, his multi-volume autobiography written in old age in a castle in Bohemia.
It is, inevitably, the Histoire that provides Ian Kelly with the bulk of his source material for this sober, thoughtful and affectionate new biography, though he makes good use of more recent discoveries, including letters and dream diaries: Casanovaists are an assiduous bunch and have thousands of miscellaneous documents to scour.
A historian by training, Kelly is also a professional actor, and the organising conceit behind his book is the structure of an 18th-century opera. Rather than chapters, we have acts and scenes and intermezzos, for Kelly wishes us to view his subject’s life illuminated by the flicker, the teasing half-lights of the theatre.
Some of the associations are direct and obvious. Casanova’s mother was an actress; his father – there are various candidates – was probably one of the impresarios who employed her. Many of his friends and conquests were denizens of the theatrical demimonde, and he himself, though never professionally on stage, played, briefly, the violin in the orchestra pit at the San Samuele theatre in Venice. But beyond such literal connections, theatre is a metaphor that spotlights Casanova’s actorly self-consciousness, his eagerness to play multiple roles, his constant, tireless sense of himself as a performer.
All the best-known adventures are here. His sexual coming-of-age with the sisters Marta and Nanetta; his affair with the cross-dressing Henriette ; his escape from incarceration in the Doge’s palace; his duel with Count Branki in Poland. It is material available in a dozen different biographies; but what Kelly does to great effect is to place this extraordinary man in context, rooting him firmly in the practices and practicalities of pre-revolutionary Europe.
Out of this come some interesting speculations. Was, for example, Casanova’s sex life exceptional, or was it typical, predictable even, for a man in his circumstances? He was a (self-described) “professional libertine”, a restless and heroic traveller who moved in circles where sex, in some form or another, was always on the menu. Prostitution, then as now, thrived everywhere and was not usually considered a shameful resort. High-class courtesans were openly traded as formal mistresses between financially eligible men. Daughters could be bought from greedy or cash-strapped families. Women on the margins of society might offer their “persons” in exchange for the security of a male escort.
Given all this, Casanova no longer appears so freakishly accomplished, nor, it seems, did he ever consider himself so. He was never the sort to brag or cut notches into his bedpost; neither did he have the libertine’s tiresome disdain for those who fell to him. Women, however he came by them, were, on the whole, treated respectfully. Many remained his friends, corresponding with him for years.
Lots of sex then, but lots of everything else, too. These memoirs are crowded with incident, with meetings, witty conversations and boozy dinners. He met Voltaire. He met Catherine the Great. He may have contributed to Da Ponte’s libretto for Don Giovanni. Rather than the shallow seducer of popular imagining, his appeal is as a man – flawed, humorous, engagingly self-deprecating – whose vast appetite for life still acts as a tonic on those who come to know him. Kelly conveys all this admirably, and for readers unlikely to grapple with the Histoire itself, his book makes an excellent introduction to a complex and surprisingly modern life.
Andrew Miller is author of ‘Casanova’ (Sceptre). His new novel, ‘One Morning Like a Bird’, will be published in September
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Casanova, by Ian Kelly
Lovers galore – and good meals
Reviewed by Sarah Bakewell
Friday, 27 June 2008
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'I am insatiable," wrote Giacomo Casanova in a letter: "always questioning, curious, demanding, intolerable." He could not get enough; could not stay still. The legendary 18th-century Venetian libertine lived life "at a gallop", as Ian Kelly puts it in his sparkling biography. Even when he did run out of libido and sexual opportunities, he had plenty of energy left for writing, producing the 4,000 handwritten pages of rip-roaring memoir which would one day make him famous.
These days, Casanova is a brand name, synonymous with serial seduction in the way that Hoover is with dust-sucking. Yet it would surprise him to learn that he is only remembered for his sex life. He was also a traveller, an alchemist, a cabbalist, a librarian, a confidence trickster, a librettist, a poet, a translator, a science-fiction novelist, a spy and the founder of a state lottery. He even started out as a trainee priest, though he abandoned this after forgetting his lines and fainting the first time he tried to deliver a sermon.
As that episode suggests, Casanova was inept and shy in youth. That changed once he discovered that an attitude of bold charm could open doors, as well as purses and legs. All you needed to seduce a woman, he learned, was to give her your undivided attention. So rare was this experience that no woman could resist.
It helped that his interest was real. In most cases, Casanova seems genuinely to have fallen in love, or at least a sort of affectionate lust. He liked to remain friends after an affair ended, and was more interested in giving pleasure than taking it. He did not carve notches on his bedpost.
The number of women he made love to was not exceptionally high: somewhere between 122 and 136, depending on how you count, plus a few men. This is a tenth of the body count achieved by his fictional counterpart, Don Giovanni. What made Casanova extraordinary was not the statistics, but how he integrated his sexual voracity into a general attitude to life, and how well he wrote about it afterwards.
Kelly has a fine way with libertines and dandies: his last book was about Beau Brummell, and he also presents TV programmes about food history. He approaches his new subject with a healthy appetite, and provides a fresh angle on Casanova as gastronome: a man whose memoirs described over 200 meals, who loved Neapolitan oysters, and who once ate a lock of a lover's hair inside a sugared sweet, flavoured with "essences of ambergris, angelica, vanilla, alkermes and styrax".
No writer on Casanova can avoid getting slightly crowded out by the subject: the 12-volume History of My Life leaves biographers with little more to contribute than a side-salad and a finger-bowl. But Kelly keeps his main source under control, nudging the History aside to bring on period details and archival titbits. He structures the story as a play, complete with four intermezzi on travel, food, sex and the Cabbala. This breaks up the long parade of women – and of cities, for Casanova spent his life pinballing between Venice, Naples, Constantinople, Paris, Amsterdam, London, St Petersburg and innumerable other places. Kelly turns these cities into characters, especially the extraordinary, theatrical Venice – a place where, for almost half of each year, people still wore carnival masks whenever they left their houses.
Venice's masks and veils festoon the story, as do curtains, keyholes, subterfuges, disguises, cross-dressers and peeping toms. There are nuns; there are threesomes; there are virgins aplenty. As Casanova gets older, the virgins get younger, and his behaviour becomes more exploitative – often disturbingly so.
Sometimes he met his match. One Frenchwoman in London reduced him to such despair that he tried to throw himself off Westminster Bridge. He was stopped by a friend who suggested he write his memoirs instead. This idea returned to him when he had become a lonely, cantankerous man given to muttering "Scum!" after the youngsters who laughed at his outmoded clothes and dancing style. His life of sensuous joy gave him his raw material; his unhappy old age gave him the desire to write about it. The autobiography emerged from a balance between exuberance and misery – and we are the richer for it. As Kelly writes, Casanova's story asks us all "to live a little more fully".
Sarah Bakewell's 'The English Dane' is published by Vintage
From The Sunday Times
July 6, 2008