Arthur Hbscher and on the notes in the cu rrently appearing German translations by its editor Professor Erich Loos. T hey are intended to identify persons brought on the stage, or even merely mentio ned, in the memoirs and to elucidate Casanova's historical and other references for the general reader. In large part, they go back to the notes supplied by a number of Casanova specialists--notably Gustav Gugitz--for the La Sirne edition.
The notes to that edition, in their full form, are still indispensable to any th orough student of Casanova. Willard R. Trask Brooklyn, New York, February Casanova was prevented by death from fulfilling this promise.
His memoi rs end with the summer of The doctrine of the Stoics, [2] and of any other sect, on the power of Destiny is a figment of the imagination which smacks of atheism. I am not only a monotheist but a Christian whose faith is strengthened by philosophy, which has never injured anything. I believe in the existence of an immaterial God, creator and lord of all forms; and what proves to me that I have never doubted it is that I have always counted upon his providence, turning to him through prayer in all my tribulatio.
Despair kills; prayer dissipates it; an d after praying man trusts and acts. What means the Being of Beings employs to a vert the evils which hang over those who implore his aid is a question above the power of human intelligence, which, even as it contemplates the incomprehensibi lity of Divine Providence, cannot but adore it.
Our ignorance becomes our only r esource; and the truly happy are they who cherish it. So we must pray to God and believe that we have obtained grace even when appearances tell us that we have not. Reason is a particle of the Creator's divinity. If we use it to make our selves humble and just, we cannot but please him who gave it to us. God does not cease to be God except for those who consider his nonexistence possible.
They c annot suffer a greater punishment. Though man is free, he must not believe that he is free to do whatever h e pleases. He becomes a slave as soon as he decides to act when he is moved by s ome passion. Such a b eing is rare. The reader who likes to think will see in these memoirs that, since I ne ver aimed at a set goal, the only system I followed, if system it may be called, was to let myself go wherever the wind which was blowing drove me.
What vicissi tudes in this independence from method and system! My ill fortune no less than m y good proved to me that both in this physical world and in the moral world good comes from evil as evil comes from good.
My errors will show thoughtful readers these opposite roads or will teach them the great art of straddling the ditch. The one thing necessary is courage, for strength without confidence is useless. I have often seen good fortune fall in my lap as the result of some incautious s tep which should have cast me into the abyss; and, though I blamed myself, I tha nked God. On the other hand, I have also seen an overwhelming misfortune follow upon a course of conduct duly weighed by prudence; I was humiliated; but, sure t hat I had been right, I soon consoled myself.
Despite an excellent moral foundation, the inevitable fruit of the divin e principles which were rooted in my heart, I was all my life the victim of my s enses; I have delighted in going astray and I have constantly lived in error, wi th no other consolation than that of knowing I had erred.
For this reason I hope , dear reader, that, far from finding my history mere impudent boasting, you wil l find that it has the tone suited to a general confession, though in the style of my narratives you will find neither a show of repentance nor the constraint o f one who blushes to confess his escapades.
My follies are the follies of youth. You will see that I laugh at them, and if you are kind you will laugh at them w ith me. You will laugh when you discover that I often had no scruples about dece iving nitwits and scoundrels and fools when I found it necessary.
As for women, this sort of reciprocal deceit cancels itself out, for when love enters in, both parties are usually dupes. But fools are a very different matter. I always cong ratulate myself when I remember catching them in my snares, for they are insolen t and presumptuous to the point of challenging intelligence. We avenge intellige nce when we deceive a fool, and the victory is worth the effort, for a fool is e ncased in armor and we do not know where to attack him.
In short, deceiving a fo ol is an exploit worthy of an intelligent man. What has infused my very blood wi th an unconquerable hatred of the whole tribe of fools from the day of my birth is that I become a fool myself whenever I am in their company.
They are, however , to be distinguished from the class of men whom we term stupid, for since the s tupidity of the latter is due only to their lack of education, I rather like the m. I have found some of them who were very decent and whose stupidity was almost. They are like eyes which, but for a cataract, would be extremely beautiful.
If you, my dear reader, will consider the nature of this preface, you wi ll find it easy to see my purpose in it. I have written it because I want you to know me before you read me. It is only at coffeehouses and inns that we convers e with strangers. I have written my story, and no one can object to that. But am I wise to give it to a public of which I know nothing but what is to its discredit? I know that I am being unwise. But I need something to occupy me, something to ma ke me laugh; so why should I deny myself?
Worthy or unworthy, my life is my subject, my subject is my life. Having lived it without ever thinking that I should take a fancy to write it, i t may have an interest which it might not have if I had lived it intending to wr ite it in my old age and, what is more, to publish it.
Remembering the pleasures I enjoyed, I renew them, and I laugh at the pa ins which I have endured and which I no longer feel. A member of the universe, I speak to the air and I imagine I am rendering an account of my stewardship as t he majordomo does to his master, before vanishing.
So far as my future is concer ned, as a philosopher I have never thought it worth worrying over since I know n othing about it, and as a Christian, I know that faith must believe without argu ing and that the purest faith keeps the deepest silence. I know that I have exis ted, and since I am sure of that because I have felt, I also know that I shall n o longer exist when I have ceased to feel.
If by any chance I continue to feel a fter my death, I shall have no more doubts; but I will give the lie to anyone wh o comes to tell me that I am dead. Since my history should begin with the earliest fact which my memory can recall to me, it will begin when I had reached the age of eight years and four months.
Since human thought consists only in co mparisons drawn in order to examine relationships, it cannot precede the existen ce of memory. The organ of memory did not develop in my head until eight years a nd four months after my birth; it was only then that my soul began to be capable of receiving impressions. A consoling philosophy maintains, in harmony with religion, that the dep endence of the soul upon the senses and organs is only fortuitous and temporary and that the soul will be free and happy when the death of the body liberates it from their tyranny.
This is all very fine but, religion apart, it is not certai n. So, since I cannot be perfectly sure that I am immortal until after I have ce ased to live, I may be forgiven if I am in no hurry to learn this truth. A knowl edge purchased at the price of life is bought too dearly. Meanwhile, I worship G od, I refrain from committing any injustice and shun those who are unjust, thoug h I do nothing to harm them.
I am content to abstain from doing them good. I must also say something about my temperament and my character. Here th e most indulgent among my readers will not be those who are least endowed with h onesty and intelligence. I have been of all the four temperaments: the phlegmatic in my childhood , the sanguine in my youth, then the bilious, and finally the melancholic, which would seem to be with me to remain.
By adapting my diet to my constitution, I h ave always enjoyed good health, and having once learned that what impairs it is always excess, either in eating or in abstaining, I have never had any physician but myself. But I have found that abstinence is the more dangerous by far.
At my present advanced age I fi nd that, despite an excellent stomach, I should eat but once a day, but what mak es up to me for this privation is sweet sleep and the ease with which I set down my thoughts on paper without any need to indulge in paradoxes or to weave a tis sue of sophisms more apt to deceive me than my readers, for I could never bring myself to give them counterfeit coin if I knew it was counterfeit.
The sanguine temperament made me extremely susceptible to the seduction of any pleasurable sensation, always cheerful, eager to pass from one enjoyment to another and ingenious in inventing them. From it came my inclination to make new acquaintances as well as my readiness to break them off, though always for s ome good reason and never from mere fickleness.
Defects arising from a temperame nt cannot be corrected, because our temperament is independent of our powers; bu t character is another matter. It is constituted by heart and mind and, since te mperament has very little influence here, it follows that character depends on u pbringing and that it can be altered and reformed. I leave it to others to decide if my character is good or bad, but such as it is, anyone versed in physiognomy can easily read it in my face.
It is only there that a man's character becomes visible, for the physiognomy is its seat. It is worth noting that men who have no physiognomy, and there are a great many such, are equally lacking in what is called a character.
Hence the diversity of physiognomies will be equal to the diversity of characters. Having observed that I have all my life acted more from the force of fee ling than from my reflections, I have concluded that my conduct has depended mor e on my character than on my mind, after a long struggle between them in which I have alternately found myself with too little intelligence for my character and too little character for my intelligence.
Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite to mine, I have always loved it and done all th at I could to make myself loved by it.
I have also been extravagantly fond of go od food and irresistibly drawn by anything which could excite curiosity. I had friends who did me good turns, and I was so fortunate on all such occasions as to have it in my power to show them my gratitude; and I had execrab le enemies who persecuted me and whom I did not destroy only because I could not.
I would never have forgiven them if I had not forgotten the wrongs they did me. The man who forgets a wrong has not forgiven it, he has simply forgotten it; f or forgiveness comes from a heroic sentiment in a noble heart and a magnanimous mind, whereas forgetting comes from weakness of memory or from an easy apathy na tural to a pacific soul, and often from a need for peace and quiet; for hatred, in the end, kills the unfortunate man who fosters it.
If anyone calls me a sensualist he will be wrong, for the power of my se nses never drew me from my duty when I had one. As for women, I have always found that the one I was in love with smelled good, and the more copious her sweat th e sweeter I found it. What a depraved taste! How disgraceful to admit it and not blush for it! This sort of criticism makes me laugh.
It is precisely by virtue of my coarse t astes, I have the temerity to believe, that I am happier than other men, since I am convinced that my tastes make me capable of more pleasure. Happy they who kn ow how to obtain pleasure without harming anyone; they are madmen who imagine th at the Great Being can enjoy the griefs, the sufferings, the abstinences which t hey offer him in sacrifice, and that he loves none but fanatics who inflict them on themselves.
God can demand of his creatures only that they practice the virt ues whose seed he has sown in their souls, and he has given us nothing which is not meant to make us happy: selfesteem, desire for praise, emulation, vigor, cou rage, and a power which no tyranny can take from us: the power to kill ourselves if, after calculating, be it rightly or wrongly, we are unfortunate enough to f ind it our best recourse.
It is the strongest proof of that moral freedom in us which sophism has so often argued against. Yet nature rightly holds it in abhorr ence; and all religions cannot but forbid it. A would-be freethinker told me one day that I could not call myself a ph ilosopher and at the same time accept revelation. If we do not doubt it in the physical world, why should we not accept it in religion?
It is only a question of the form which it takes. Spirit speaks to spirit, not to the ears. The principles of all that we know must have been reve aled to those who handed them down to us by the great and supreme principle whic h contains all principles.
The bee making its hive, the swallow building its nes t, the ant digging its hole, the spider weaving its web would never have done an ything without a previous eternal revelation.
We must either believe that this i s so, or admit that matter thinks. Why not, Locke[16] would say, if God so wille d? But we dare not do such honor to matter. So let us hold to revelation. The great philosopher who, after studying nature, thought he could cry " Victory! If he had lived a few more years he would have gone much further and his journey would not have been a long one.
Could God, the great principle of principles, and who never had a principle--could even he conceive himself if to conceive himself he had to know his own principle? O happ y ignorance! Spinoza, the virtuous Spinoza, died without having attained to it. He would have died a wise man, with the right to expect the reward of his virtue s, if he had supposed that his soul was immortal.
It is not true that an expectation of reward is unworthy of true virtue and impairs its purity, for, on the contrary, it helps to sustain virtue, since man is too weak to wish to be virtuous only for his own satisfaction. In short, I believe that there is not an honest man in the world without some sort of expectation. And now I w ill set forth mine. I expect the friendship, the esteem, and the gratitude of my readers. Th eir gratitude, if reading my memoirs will have given them instruction and pleasu re.
Their esteem if, doing me justice, they will have found that I have more vir tues than faults; and their friendship as soon as they come to find me deserving of it by the frankness and good faith with which I submit myself to their judgm ent without in any way disguising what I am. They will find that I have always loved truth so passionately that I hav e often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into minds which were ignorant of its charms.
They will not condemn me when they see me emptying my f riends' purses to satisfy my whims. They were possessed by chimerical projects,. I deceived them to make them wise; and I d id not consider myself guilty, because what I did was not prompted by avarice. I was simply paying for my pleasures with money allotted to acquiring possessions which nature makes it impossible to obtain.
I should consider myself guilty if I were a rich man today. I have nothing; whatever I had, I have squandered; and this consoles and justifies me. It was money which was to be spent on follies; I merely changed its application by making it pay for mine If I am deceived in my hope of pleasing, I admit that I should be sorry, but not sorry enough to make me repent of having written, for nothing can change the fact that I have found i t a pastime.
The cruelty of boredom! It can only be because they had forgotten i t that the inventors of the pains of hell did not include it among them.
Yet I will confess that I cannot rid myself of the fear of being hissed. It is too natural a fear for me to dare boast that I am above it; and I am far from consoling myself by hoping that when my memoirs are published I shall be no more. It horrifies me even to imagine myself contracting the slightest obligati on to death, which I loathe.
Happy or unhappy, life is the only treasure which m an possesses, and they who do not love it do not deserve it. Honor is set above it only because dishonor blasts it.
If a man faced with this choice kills himsel f, philosophy can have nothing to say. O death! Cicero[20] says tha t it frees us from our ills.
That great philosopher records the expenditure, but does not include the receipts in his accounting. I do not remember if, when he wrote his Tusculans, his Tulliola was dead.
Death is a monster which drives an a ttentive spectator from the great theater before the play in which he is infinit ely interested is over. This alone is reason enough to hate it. In these memoirs the reader will not find all my adventures. I have left out those which would have offended the people who played a part in them, for t hey would cut a sorry figure in them. Even so, there are those who will sometime s think me only too indiscreet; I am sorry for it.
If I become wise before I die , and if I have time, I will burn my whole manuscript. At the moment I have not the strength of mind for that. Those who think that I lay on too much color when I describe certain amo rous adventures in detail will be wrong, unless, that is, they consider me a bad painter altogether. I beg them to forgive me if, in my old age, my soul is redu ced to feeling no joys but those of memory.
Virtue will skip all the pictures wh ich may affright it; and I am glad to give it this warning in my preface. So muc h the worse for those who do not read it. The preface stands to the work as the bill does to the play.
It is to be read. I have not written these memoirs for th ose young people who can only save themselves from falling by spending their you th in ignorance, but for those whom experience of life has rendered proof agains t being seduced, whom living in the fire has transformed into salamanders. Since true virtues are only habits, I can say that the truly virtuous are those happy people who practice them without any effort.
Such people have no notion of into lerance. It is for them that I have written. I have written in French instead of in Italian because the French language is more widely known than mine. The puri sts who, finding turns of expression proper to my native country in my style, wi ll criticize me on that score will be right if they are prevented from understan ding me.
The Greeks relished Theophrastus[21] despite his Eresian expressions, a s the Romans did their Livy[22] despite his "Patavinity. All Italy relishes Algarotti [23] although his style is full of Gallicisms. Yet it is worth observing that among all the living languages in the rep ublic of letters,[24] French is the only one which its presiding judges[25] have sentenced not to enrich itself at the expense of the other languages, whereas t hese, though all richer than French, pillaged it not only of its words but also of its mannerisms as soon as they realized that these little thefts beautified t hem.
Yet those who subjected it to this law at the same time admitted its povert y. They said that since it had reached the point of possessing all the beauties of which it was capable, the slightest foreign admixture would disfigure it.
In Lully's[26] day the whole nation thought the same of its music, until Rameau[27] came to teach it better. Today, under the Republican government, eloquent orators and learned writers hav e already convinced all Europe that they will raise French to a pitch of beauty and power which the world has not yet seen in any other language. In the short s pace of five years it has already acquired some hundred words which are amazing either for their sweetness or their majesty or their noble harmony.
Long live the Re public! A body without a head cannot possibly commit follies. For my part, since I have always admitted that I was the chief cause of all the misfortunes which have befallen me, I have rejoiced in my ability to be my own pupil, and in my duty to love my teacher. He was secretary to King Alfonso. A ll the offspring of this marriage died in infancy except Don Juan, who in m arried Eleonora Albini, by whom he had a son named Marcantonio.
He fled to Como with his wife and son, then he set out to seek his fortune. He died on a voyage with Christopher Columbus i n the year The same Giulio de' Medici, having become Pope Clement VII, pardoned him and summoned him back to Rome, where, after the city was taken and pillaged by the Imperial troops[11] in the year , he died of the plague.
Otherwise he wo uld have died of poverty, for the soldiers of Charles V[12] had robbed him of al l he possessed. Three months after his death his wife gave birth to Giacomo Casanova, wh o died at an advanced age in France as a colonel in the army commanded by Farnes e[14] against Henri, King of Navarre,[15] later King of France.
He had left a so. Giacomo had two sons, of whom the elder, Giovanni Battista , left Parma in the year ; what became of him is not known. The younger son, Gaetano Giuseppe Giacomo, also forsook his family in the year , at the age of seventeen. This is all that I have found in a notebook of my father's. What follows I learned from my mother's lips: Gaetano Giuseppe Giacomo left his family, enam ored by the charms of an actress named Fragoletta[16] who played soubrette roles.
In love and without means of support, he decided to earn his living by turning his personal advantages to account. He took up dancing and, five years later, t urned actor, becoming even more highly regarded for his probity than for his tal ent. Whether from fickleness or because she had given him cause for jealousy, he abandoned Fragoletta and went to Venice, where he joined a troop of actors w hich played at the Teatro San Samuele.
The young actor fell in love with the girl, succeeded in awakening her heart, and persuaded her to elop e with him. Being an actor, he could not hope to obtain her by gaining the conse nt of Marzia her mother, still less that of Girolamo her father, who thought an actor an abomination.
Provided with the necessary certificates and accompanied b y two witnesses, the young lovers presented themselves before the Patriarch of V enice,[18] who united them in marriage. Marzia, the girl's mother, protested lou dly, and the father died of grief. I was born of this marriage[19] nine months l ater, on April 2 of the year The following year my mother left me in the care of hers, who had forgiv en her when she learned that my father had promised never to force her to appear on the stage.
This is a promise which all actors make to the daughters of bourg eois families whom they marry, and which they never keep because their wives nev er hold them to it. As it turned out, my mother was very glad that she had learn ed to act, for, being left a widow with six children nine years later, she could not have brought them up.
I was one year old, then, when my father left me in Venice to go to Lond on to act. It was in that great city that my mother made her first appearance on the stage, and it was there that, in the year , she gave birth[20] to my br other Francesco, the celebrated painter of battle pictures, who has been living at Venice since the year , practicing his profession.
My mother came back to Venice with her husband toward the end of the yea r and, having become an actress, she continued in that career. In the year she gave birth to my brother Giovanni, who died at Dresden toward the end o f the year , serving the Elector[21] as director of the Academy of Painting. In the course of the three following years, she gave birth to two girls,[22] of whom one died in infancy and the other was married in Dresden, where, in this y ear , she is still living.
I had another brother, born posthumously,[23] who became a priest and died at Rome fifteen years ago. And now to come to the beginning of my own existence as a thinking being. In the beginning of August in the year my organ of memory developed. I wa s then eight years and four months old. I remember nothing of what may have happ ened to me before that time. This is the incident: I was standing in the corner of a room, leaning against the wall, holding my head, and staring at the blood w hich was streaming to the floor from my nose.
My grandmother Marzia, whose pet I was, came to me, washed my face with cold water, and, unknown to anyone in the house, boarded a gondola with me and took me to Murano. This is a densely popula ted island about half an hour from Venice. Leaving the gondola, we enter a hovel, where we find an old woman sittin g on a pallet, with a black cat in her arms and five or six others around her. S he was a witch. The two old women had a long conversation, of which I must have been the subject.
At the end of their dialogue in the Friulian language,[24] my grandmother gave the witch a silver ducat,[25] whereupon she opened a chest, too k me up in her arms, put me into it, shut it, and locked the lid on me, telling. I kept quiet, holding my handkerchief to my n ose because I was still bleeding and feeling quite unperturbed by the racket I h eard being made outside. I heard alternate laughter and weeping, cries, singing, and sundry thumps on the chest. It was all one to me.
Finally they took me out; my blood stops flowing. After giving me numberless caresses, this strange woman undresses me, lays me on the bed, burns simples, collects the smoke from them i n a sheet, wraps me in it, recites spells over me, then unwraps me and gives me five very good-tasting sweetmeats. She next rubs my temples and the back of my n eck with a sweet-smelling unguent, and dresses me again. She says that my bleedi ng will gradually diminish, provided I tell no one what she had done to cure me, but solemnly warns me that I will lose all my blood and die if I dare reveal he r mysteries to anyone.
After impressing this upon me she tells me that a charmin g lady will visit me the following night, and that my happiness will depend upon her, if I have the strength of mind to tell no one that I received such a visit. We left and returned home. I had scarcely gone to bed before I fell asleep without even remembering the fine visitor I was to receive. But waking several hours later, I saw, or th ought I saw, a dazzlingly beautiful woman come down by the chimney, wearing a hu ge pannier and a dress of magnificent material, with a crown on her head set wit h a profusion of stones which seemed to me to be sparkling with fire.
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Shelves: memoirs , fiction-literature-classics. Incredible, Insightful, Captivating Casanova's "History" is an enthralling portrait of himself, his times, and his conquests.
It is written in a chatty yet elegant style that seems bent on seducing the reader too. What is immediately obvious here is that Casanova was no ordinary Lothario but truly esteemed women and yearned for their approval as much as for their bodies.
The memoir is also a priceless sketch of 18th life and mores, upper and lower Incredible, Insightful, Captivating The memoir is also a priceless sketch of 18th life and mores, upper and lower classes, and politics both great and small his book can't be recommended too highly.
A child of the theater, he lives in the grey space between rich and poor. When he sets out to make his way in the world he is armed with his wit, his charm, and his flexible sense of ethics. His adventures and misadventures take him from Venice to Rome to Greece to Turkey. He starts a career within the church, makes money as an alchemist, and delights in the life of a gambler. There is probably a lot to criticise in the behaviour of Casanova, but his charm even wins over the reader.
It is difficult to sit in judgement when he so cheerfully judges himself. There is something for nearly everyone in these two volumes. History readers will get an intimate look at manners of the 18th century.
Fans of autobiography and memoir will find this one of the most interesting and extensive examples that they have read. Teenagers will relate to some very familiar scenes of youthful rebellion moments that have apparently changed very little in the past several hundred years. Even the novel reader who does not normally read memoir should find that there is enough adventure and derring-do to keep the pages turning. The translation by Trask is clean and does not get in the way.
This is worth reading in its entirety and I would personally skip the abridged version for the unabridged. My only complaint about the Johns Hopkins University Press Edition was that the notes for Volume I were in the middle of the book, and it would have been easier as the reader to have the notes for both volumes at the end. Jun 02, Gillian rated it really liked it. I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with these first two parts of Casanova's memoir, only because I was expecting more graphic descriptions of his sexual exploits.
However, it read as more of an adventure story, detailing all the interesting things that happened to him between birth and age I was still greatly entertained, and put up with all of his euphemisms because he seemed to be generally in love with each conquest he made though he did not them conquests and therefore seeme I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with these first two parts of Casanova's memoir, only because I was expecting more graphic descriptions of his sexual exploits.
I was still greatly entertained, and put up with all of his euphemisms because he seemed to be generally in love with each conquest he made though he did not them conquests and therefore seemed like less of a jerk than I expected. These non-conquests also seemed to be generally grateful to him, even when he would leave them to make his fortune in some other way or fall in love with someone else.
I guess the action must have been pretty bad for all of these women to go for Casanova without any promise of marriage or honor, even though the majority of the ones he fell in love with were virgins or young wives of other men. A true player. I'm not sure I'll read the other 10 volumes of his memoir, but I did enjoy analyzing his characters and life philosophy while reading these volumes. If you're looking for an erotic novel about some bare-chested Italian with fabio hair bringing the magic to thousands of women, this memoir is slightly classier than what you're looking for.
Dec 21, Giacomo Casanova rated it it was amazing. What an amazing book I recommend, without reserve, that you read his memoirs. Just make sure to pace yourself as his complete memoirs are long 6 books. Jul 16, Lindsey is currently reading it. I passed on the page paperback in the gift shops in Venice and decided to read the real thing.
I'm so glad I did! His stories often racy and detailed are fantastic! I love learning about the style and way of life of his time. I believe he documents the time period well. I'm not done reading yet but I'm working on it!
This is one of the only books I'm reading on my iPad because I often have to look up definitions of words. Having a dictionary near by is definitely helpful. Aug 12, najla rated it liked it Shelves: man-love. Mar 05, Sylvia rated it it was amazing. An account of the life of Giacomo Casanova as he recalls events and times as an old man.
Incredibly insightful, with very modern thoughts and concerns about self, romance, family, politics and human behavior. Interesting social history.. I am looking for the next few volumes. May 12, Ron Dakron rated it really liked it.
Casanova is, in my opinion, one of the first modernist writers. Since I don't read Italian, I'm not sure if it's simply the translation or the spirit of the original--but what a relief from the overheated prose of the 18thth century. He talks about his fascinating life in clear, concise prose. The fact that he's also hilarious is pure bonus. Mar 23, Betsy rated it liked it. Written in a surprisingly modern style, easy to breeze through!
I'll be through all 12 volumes in no time Even though his style was casual, and the insights into daily life at the time were fascinating, it became a tedious read, and I started to lose sympathy for him.
Sadly, I don't think I'll be making it through the other volumes. Oct 14, Gary Olson rated it liked it. Casanova's life was amazing, with enough adventure and intrigue to fill Unfortunately, that's exactly what he decided to do, and while much of it is interesting and involving, after a while I just kept saying 'how much longer does this go on? Aug 19, Erik rated it it was amazing. Feb 28, Dan McGrady rated it it was amazing. I'm amazed at how many good storie Casanova managed to fit into this book and it was only the first two volumes.
As the back cover says, this may indeed be the most interesting memoirs ever written although I'm no expert. Highly recommended. Seven devils This is my day Somebody died at the party Heavy Metal Brother Welcome to my nightmare Bonustrack: Demons dare to stay.
The Kingdom arises 2. Kingdom of the night II 3. Rolling like thunder 4. Little war 5. Love is like an ocean 6. Living in a dream 7. Hall of fame 8. Tales of glory island Trash in Tibet Heaven in paradise Angel of death Julia Another day Ships are sailing We are the world Venom The war Take my hand Dance with the dead Fire and ice Heavy rain Heaven in black My little princess Little look back Stay don't leave me Living in a world Kingdom of the night Na, na, kiss him goodbye.
Venom 3. Beyond The Sky 4. The War 5. Never Again 6. Soulfire 7. More Than For One Day 8. Lass Dich Gehn 9. Lie After Lie Bites Inside. Hall Of Fame 2.
Heaven In Paradise 3. Living In A Dream 4. My Eyes 6. Dance Into Life 7. We Are The World 9. Take Me Far Away Gone With The Wind Temple Of Rock Owner of a lonely heart 2. Ma Baker 3. Stayin' alive 4. Roboter 5. White Wedding 6. Another day in paradise 7.
Message in a bottle 8. Locomotive breath 9. Life is life Somebody to love My heart will go on. Carbonara She Drives Me Crazy Come Back and Stay Good Times Bad Times. Journey To Utopia 2. Utopia 3. Blood Angel 4. Last Man On Earth 5. Lady Moon 6. My Little Princess 7. When The Sun Goes Down 8. Kings Made Of Steel Waterdrop Heaven In Black Little War Better World Livin' In The Dark Flashback Radio Brother Moon Face To Face Save Me
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