Book Review: Casanova - Actor Lover Priest Spy

“Paris, despite all the wit of the French, is and will always be a city in which impostors will succeed…a characteristic which…comes from the supreme influence of fashion.” - Casanova

I wrapped up this lovely book on Sunday at the beach. I have always had a hard time getting into biographies. Trying to keep up with the dates, names, and events in someone’s life always got a little bit confusing about halfway through. So for the longest time I didn’t even bother going down the biography section of the library. But for some reason this book called out to me. And I am so utterly happy that it happened.

Ian Kelly is such an amazing writer. This book read more like a novel than a biography. Granted there were a few parts that I had to go back and reference who he was referring to, but that could be because Casanova had so many loves. Another aspect of the book that I really loved was the layout. It is broken down into five acts (theatre played such a large role in Casanova’s life), with 4 intermezzos and a curtain call. I loved the intermezzos because of their topics - “Casanova and Travel in the Eighteenth Century”, “Casanova and Sex in the Eighteenth Century”, “Casanova and the Cabbala”, and “Casanova - Food-write”. 

Kelly points out when real life doesn’t match up with the scenarios in Casanova’s memoirs. Some of his stories reflected the style of writing of the day, and the complete accuracy of some sexual encounters have been stretched. But there is also so much that is accurate in his memoirs, and that can be historically proven.

I loved reading about all of his travels. Sometimes by choice and other times by force, Casanova saw a lot of the world. He definitely had his ups and downs in life, and his downs were very very low. But he also had a plethora of friends throughout his life that kept him going. His writing about food is some of the only records of the century, and he was quite the connoisseur. It was also amazing to read with so many of his affairs, that he believed he was in love. 

Some other things that I didn’t know about him - his sexual encounters included a few times with other men, as well as an encounter with his daughter, and an affair with his niece. He ran a lottery in France, and made good money for awhile. He also used the cabbala to gain some very very rich friends/patrons. 

Portrait of Casanova by his brother, Francesco

I want to leave you with a few of my favorite passages. This book was truly amazing, and Mr. Kelly sparked a new interest in biographies. I highly recommend it, and would love to hear your thoughts on it if you’ve read it.

“He left, at his death in 1798, 1,703 letters, fifty drafts of dialogues, 150 memos, sixty-seven printed items, 390 poems as well as nearly five hundred pages of uncategorized writings; more than three thousand manuscript pages of various works in progress, in addition to his memoirs, that ran to nearly four thousand folio pages, and existed, once, in multiple hand-copied versions.” - Act V Scene V, Casanova, Ian Kelly

“The eighteenth century, with Cupid as its ubiquitous emblem and Casanova as its primary social commentator, openly made love and sex fashionable; it was the beginning of the assertion of sexuality in the European consciousness that has been one of the most eye-catching hues of modern Western thought. Casanova’s love-life, presented in intimate though rarely explicit detail, can now hold its place as one of the key documents of the era and in the birth of modern ideas of how to record a love life, how to record a whole life and, for that matter, why one would choose to. This uniquely Casanovan ability to both live and enunciate the new sexual freedoms - his invention of sex for the modern world - echoes down the generations, through the emancipation, political and feminist, of the nineteenth century and the sexual revolution of the twentieth.” - Curtain Call, Casanova, Ian Kelly