Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Amazon.com
In his first novel,Ingenious Pain, AndrewMiller told the tale of a man who felt too little; in his second novel, he features a man who feels too much. Set like its predecessor at the end of the 18th century, Casanova in Love follows the fortunes of that legendary lover whose name is now synonymous with womanizer. Miller drew parts of his story from Giacamo Casanova's own Histoire de Ma Vie, and indeed the novel begins in the German castle where thereal magilla spent his last years writing his autobiography. There, as the now elderly and frail adventurer burns letters and papers, he is interrupted by a mysterious woman who has come to hear the story of one particular era in his past:

Imagine him now: thirty-eight years of age, big chin, big nose, big eyes in a face of "African tint," a guardsman's brawny chest and shoulders, stepping down the gangplank in Dover harbour.... In the customs house he gave his name as de Seingalt, the Chevalier de Seingalt, a citizen of France. Lies, of course, or something like them, but it pleased him to dream up names for himself; it was also politic. Europe--the parts of it that counted--was a small place, and in his travels he had met at least half the people of influence in the entire continent. "Casanova" was in too many documents, too many secret reports and in the minds of too many people he would rather not encounter again.

Customer Reviews (11)

The masochistic gamble of unwanted love
In addition to being a gifted writer, Andrew Miller is an extraordinarily skilled observer of human nature. I found "Casanova in Love" to be a keenly insightful look at human vulnerability in the face of two overpowering forces: age and love.

"Casanova in Love" is not by any means a biography of the great seducer: rather, through Casanova Miller explores the darker side of relationships. It is 1763, and a jaded 38-year-old Casanova finds himself in London, wealthy, notorious, yet restless. He feels something is amiss with his life, or rather, that the life he has created for himself is no longer enough to satisfy him: "[E]ach day another pig-white hair to pluck from nose or eyebrow, and in [his heart] the knowledge that the vertex had already passed, that there was nothing now but twenty, thirty more years of being Casanova: a tedious, more grudging re-enactment of the done."

Already weakened by creeping self-doubt, the hunter becomes the hunted. Beautiful 17-year-old courtesan Marie Charpillon seems a veritable fountain of youth. For the rest of the book, in richly worded vignettes, some hilarious, some embarassing, Casanova's behavior is a catalog of the pathetic. He exemplifies the temporary blindness of those who try too hard to make someone else love them. After all, Charpillon herself had stated her goal as "making him fall in love with me, and then torturing him." Yet the mere sight of her deafens him to these words, and there seems to be no indignity he will not endure, always in the hope that this time, this one, will be rewarded with love in return.

There is no love in this story, of course. Not in her abuse of him, nor in his obsession with her. Yet compared to her calculated humiliation of him, Casanova's obsession seems at least the forgivable honest mistake of a man trying clumsily to do what he believes is right, in this case, to love. Gambling is a recurring theme in the book, a reminder of the high stakes and the chances we take when we let our defenses down to someone else. A simplistic writer's approach to this book would have been to portray Casanova's torment as his just desserts for the way he'd treated other women. Miller rises above this inadequate theme. Casanova's tale is a parable for a million other relationships. It is a beautifully written warning against trying too hard to be loved, a brutal cautionary look at how we expose ourselves to being used if we open ourselves up to the wrong person.

not for Casanova-philes
I didn't enjoy this book as much as I had expected. Mostly because it isn't exactly true to Casanova's memoirs, which I was hoping it would be. But it's a good piece of fiction besides. Don't pick the book up planning to get a new perspective on his affair with La Charpillon. Even the hilarious parrot story is retold. If you're a fan of historical fiction, give it a read. It is an entertaining story.

Good, but I'm not a great lover of this book...
I really like Casanova, and I've found his memoirs to be great reading.When I saw this book, I thought it would be an enjoyable, sensual period story.I was slightly disappointed, however; it is somewhat sensual, but not much.The story becomes kind of unbelievable at times, and by the end of the novel I didn't really care that it was over.The parts that are fun to read seem to be the parts based on Casanova's own writings.

Love not SATED but HATED
"It was strange to see, Monsieur, a comedy where the bruises were not painted. One pitied them even as one laughed at them." (p.265)

Miller's Casanova tries to wear many hats. He is poetic in his fumblings. The reader is not witness to a dexterous lover. Oh no! This a tragic comedy of a man who dotes too long on what he views as his former self and what he can do to get that vigor back. But like a drunk who can't button his shirt, he learns eventually that there is always that simple mortal limitation that sets man on his heels-love. For Miller's earthly Casanova, it is a woman of such intriguing pathos that one cannot help but be annoyed by and want to pity her in the same moment. The web of language Miller weaves is hypnotic. To weep or not weep? To laugh or not to laugh? It doesn't matter. His words are tender clouds to float on from thought to vaporous thought.

Love is characterized by the author's lugubrious and then beatific symbolism - a rose with no thorns, a maze, shared sickness, a flood, and a theater turned court.In the end, it is just judgments made of foolish people too in love to really be in love, after all.

For more tales of unrequited love, try classics like Henry James' "Wings of the Dove", or the best of the best Bronte's "Wuthering Heights".

The Lush Life
Lydia Flem's stunning, intense biography "Casanova: the Man Who Loved Women" revealed him to be anything but a shallow, woman-hating libertine.This wildly generous autodidact, who was devoted to pleasure ofall kinds, did indeed enjoy sex, but not mindlessly: he reveled in womenwho were intelligent and witty.

Andrew Miller's lush, enthralling newnovel is a wonderful companion piece to Flem's work. Starting late inCasanova's life when he was a virtual exile in Switzerland, surrounded byhis memories, the book flashes back to a romantic misadventure in London. Living amid the "grubby and melancholy" English, a40ishCasanova was surprisingly gulled and tormented by a woman he was hoping toseduce.

Though based on Casanova's memoirs as Flem's book was, Miller'sCasanova is more depressed and world-weary (and thus less original).Butjust as adeptly as Flem did, Miller evokes Casanova's amazingly complexlife and paints a scintillating, evocative, erotic portrait of theextravagant 18th century.

Lev Raphael, author ofLITTLE MISS EVIL, the 4th Nick Hoffman mystery. ... Read more