Adventurer

March 28, 2022
Harvard literature professor Damrosch (The Club) takes an evenhanded look at 18th-century Italian libertine Giacomo Casanova in this scrupulous biography. Drawing largely from Casanova’s embellished autobiography, Histoire de Ma Vie, Damrosch corrects the record when historical documentation proves that the unreliable narrator offered confused timelines or impossible events. He details Casanova’s relentless pursuit of pleasure, including gambling for income and the “thrills of risk-taking,” as well as spending fortunes on fine clothing, women, and alcohol, but also alleges that his subject was a con man who used magic and mathematical tricks to part wealthy marks from their money. Most disturbingly, Damrosch contends that Casanova (and others of his era) targeted prepubescent and young teenage girls for sexual conquests, often with the complicity of their mothers. Though he largely avoids gratuitousness in recounting Casanova’s sexual exploits, Damrosch’s claim that Casanova wasn’t interested in homoerotic experiences isn’t entirely convincing. Even if Damrosch succeeds in picking apart the mythology that has cast Casanova as a charming seducer rather than a predator, his enigmatic subject remains somewhat elusive. Still, this is an eye-opening and well-informed study of an “extraordinary character” in all his darkness and brilliance.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
A vivid chronicle of the passions of an 18th-century libertine. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) has been the subject of many biographies, based largely on edited and sometimes sanitized versions of his Histoire de ma vie, in which he recounted more than 100 sexual conquests, relentless travels, and a lifetime spent perpetrating scams and cons. Damrosch, an award-winning biographer of Jonathan Swift, William Blake, and others, offers a close critical study of the original manuscript and of supplementary texts that include hundreds of pages of unpublished works. The result is a nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites who was determined to free himself from all manner of repression. He was, Damrosch writes, not "just a bad boy, he was a particular kind of bad boy" whose sexual encounters were "opportunistic and [sometimes] disturbingly exploitative." He engaged in pedophilia (though, as Damrosch explains, the age of consent at the time was 10), incest, and gang rape; claimed to have occult powers; and lost fortunes gambling. Born to actors in Venice, Casanova imbibed the spirit of the swarming, culturally diverse city. The major industry, Damrosch writes, "was pleasure," and Casanova, drawn to role-playing, fascinated by cross-dressing, and an "instinctive improvisor," thrived there. Damrosch hews closely to the narrative of the Histoire, testing Casanova's version--and the analyses of previous biographers--against available historical evidence. Still, his portrait is not a corrective to what is already well known but rather an amplification. Although he states at the outset that "the story of a notorious seducer needs to be addressed frankly and critically," Damrosch ably demonstrates his subject's energy and intelligence, "the joie de vivre, the enormous risks and hair-raising escapes, the lifelong struggle to invent and reinvent himself," as well as his impressive talent in creating a memoir "bursting with vitality"--an apt description for this beautifully illustrated biography. An authoritative, richly detailed portrait of a fascinating historical character and yet another top-notch work from Damrosch.

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