Mulcahy Conway Associates

Casanova

Giacomo Casanova: one of the most beguiling and controversial individuals of his or any age. Braggart or perfect lover? Conman or genius? He made and lost fortunes, founded two state lotteries, wrote various plays, philosophical and mathematical treatises, opera libretti, poetry, and forty-two books. His 3,600 pages of memoirs recorded hundreds of meals as well, of course, as his affairs and sexual encounters with dozens of women and a handful of men and have bought him two centuries of notoriety. Now, in CASANOVA, Ian Kelly reveals previously unpublished documents by Giacomo himself, as well as his friends and lovers, which give new insights into his life and his world. From his devotion to the Kaballah to his collaboration with Mozart on his opera Don Giovanni, from his vast appetite for food and sex to his training for priesthood, this is the fascinating story of an icon of his age and ours.

Casanova was named best biography of the year by The Sunday Times (7th December 2008).

Reviews

Where others have berated Casanova for exaggeration, inaccuracy or manifest error, Kelly extends him imaginative sympathy... he does provide a surprisingly intimate sense of what Casanova was like.

The Times

...enthralling new biography puts us right. . . It is hard to conceive of a juicier, more informative account of social and sexual mores of 18th century Europe.

Daily Mail

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... 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.

Telegraph

Born into an acting family, and living among performers all his life, Casanova knew exactly how to play to an audience. The great strength of Ian Kelly's new biography is that he emphasises this aspect of the old rogue's character... By re-examining Casanova's life... Kelly has written an adult book, or I should say one for grown-ups... it is impressive work... He pays him the compliment of taking him seriously as man of genuine historical interest.

Ben Wilson, The Spectator

The legendary 18th-century Venetian libertine lived life "at a gallop", as Ian Kelly puts it in his sparkling biography... He structures the story as a play, complete with four intermezzi on travel, food, sex and the Cabbala... 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.

Sarah Bakewell, The Independent

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.

Financial Times

Anyone who writes about Casanova is standing on a whole cohort of shoulders, so it is entirely to Kelly's credit - specifically, his ability to reimagine life on the hoof in 18th-century Europe as a series of exhilarating mini-dramas - that he has managed to make this story feel so fresh again.

The Guardian

Like Kelly's previous biography of George "Beau" Brummell, Casanova is a treasure-house of life... Kelly has set himself a hell of a task. How do you write the life of a man whose life you are writing because he's famous for having written his memoirs? The answer is deceptively simple: use the memoirs as a map to guide you back to the life, and see what emerges. The effect is as though we had gone round the back after the show. Here is Casanova himself, without the make-up and the trick lighting, talking through Kelly's subtle, reticent voice... From the murky water of Kelly's deceptively sober prose (any writer who can refer to a "cavalcade of internationalists" commands instant respect as a stylist of some wit), something emerges, scales the leads, opens the bedroom door, moves closer, smiles. It is Casanova. It's good old Jack Newhouse. He's alive. He's alive!

New Statesman

Venice, Paris and other cities where Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) restlessly traveled are brought to vivid life by food and travel writer Kelly...Kelly presents a colorful, sprightly biography of a singular man.

Publisher's Weekly

More than a salacious romp through European boudoirs, this biography peels off the layers of the legend to expose the man beneath the myth. Though Casanova's carnal exploits are duly recorded, Kelly refrains from providing unnecessarily explicit details while placing both his subject and his conquests firmly into historical context. Instead of dividing the book into standard chapters, the arrangement is operatic, with acts and scenes separated by explanatory intermezzos fleshing out various features of eighteenth-century life in general and Casanova's remarkable adventures in particular.

Booklist

Much more than a serial seducer, Casanova was a great European intellectual, a romantic, a trickster and a writer of tremendous skill and energy. He was probably, as he would be the first to admit, the most interesting man who ever lived, as this vivid and vibrant biography suggests.

The Sunday Times biography of the year 2008

Other books by this author

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  Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy

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  Cooking For Kings: The Life Of Antonin Careme - The First Celebrity Chef

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