![]() ![]() ![]() Dear god, it’s not the stuff of his legend! It’s immensely brave and the reality of a life as lived, which is touching in its way”.Īnd there you have it: in its immense commitment to detail and unfiltered record, Histoire de ma vie anticipates not only modern autobiography, but also every social media update that’s had you screaming ‘too much information’. He writes quite a lot about sexual failure he’s the only non-fiction writer I know who writes about what it is to fail a lover by having premature ejaculation, losing an erection. What makes him fascinating is his flawed humanity, which does include his willingness to be very open about his romantic and sexual life, very much to his detriment. “It shows us an inner as well as an outer person, and one key to that is of course going to be someone’s sexuality. And even though we need to get over ourselves and stop tittering at its steamier passages, we also shouldn’t discount them. What makes his magnum opus so important, says Kelly, is that gives us a new understanding of self, marking the birth of modern autobiography. In contrast with Casanova’s own reputation for playing fast and loose with facts, Casanovists are sticklers for details, she says. ![]() Could they all be his? Venice happens to be her favourite city and so, following her passion, she set about writing a guidebook to Casanova’s Venice. Bobbing along the Grand Canal, buildings would often be pointed out to her as ‘the house of Casanova’. Kathleen Gonzalez is a writer and high school English teacher in California, who first fell under his spell while working on a book about Venetian gondoliers. Today, much as Justin Bieber has Beliebers, Casanova has Casanovists, a crowd made up largely of devoted amateur scholars whose day jobs in advertising or insurance sales might have flummoxed the man himself. Of course, this all helped keep his legend alive. Towards the end of the 19th Century, France’s Bibliothèque Nationale kept multiple editions in a special cupboard for naughty books called L’Enfer (Hell). The censors had their way with his text, too, but even so the Vatican added it to their Index of Prohibited Books. It was eventually released in 1821, after editors had wielded their red pens. Indeed, more than its explicit content, it’s the work’s length and the level of quotidian detail clotting its pages that made it unpublishable. Though he shared select passages with friends and failed to burn it before his death in 1798, there is no evidence to suggest that Casanova ever intended the work to be published. Unaccountably, it ends in mid-sentence, with a 49-year-old Casanova visiting Trieste. There’s a reason it was such an essential stop for well-to-do youths set loose on their Grand Tours, and it didn’t have much to do with St Mark’s Basilica. Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725, back when the city was a hotbed of vice, famed for its gambling, its courtesans and its carnival. Moreover, the legacy that he can truly claim as his own is at once less titillating and markedly more fascinating, speaking directly to the heart of how we tell the stories of our own lives and loves in the 21st Century. The myth that gave birth to the noun, it turns out, isn’t really his creation at all. It’s little wonder, then, that we tend to forget Casanova was a real person who wined, dined and bedded his way around 18th-Century Europe, retiring to write about his exploits in X-rated detail. Above all, a Casanova is not to be believed – he’s the kind of guy who’ll say anything to get a girl into bed (and yes, he calls women ‘girls’ – either that or ‘ladies’, with a lothario’s leering emphasis on the first syllable). A ‘Casanova’ is the consummate pick-up artist, a sexual adventurer of the type who was swiping right, metaphorically speaking at least, long before your mobile phone became a singles’ bar.
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