Casanova in Bohemia

by Andrei Codrescu

Book Overview

Beloved NPR commentator and popular author Andrei Codrescu makes a stunning return to historical fiction, detailing the adventurous life and erotic times of the famed illuminist Giacomo Casanova. In... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684868008
• ISBN13: 9780684868004
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.7" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

In Praise of Decadence and Sophistication

The remarkably sophisticated Giacomo Casanova lived at the end of an era of decaying ideals. He represented both the greatest contradiction to those ideals and their staunchest defense. He was, you might say, the well-connected contrarian. Casanova in Bohemia is not a novel. Andrei Codrescu has written us instead a salon, a chance to eavesdrop on the conversation that the aging Casanova shares with the revolutionary age that's overwhelming his own. The conversation is enthralling. The fact that we are obviously listening to Codrescu's words behind Casanova's moving lips makes this particular piece of ventriloquism no less enchanting. The obvious connections between Casanova's declining world and our own and the playful sexuality of Codrescu's reconstruction of the Grand Lecher and the values of our times only make it more fun to read. An odd concession to the novelistic conceit gives the book a weird anachronistic conclusion, but you can skip it at no great loss. This is a luscious entertainment in the novel of ideas, more voluptuous than action-packed and extremely rewarding. --Lynn Hoffman, author of the slightly decadent bang BANG: A Novel

casanova is back!

Casanova in Bohemia is a brilliant and absorbing work, gifted with intellectual wit, historical facts, tenderness, humor, magic - a combine Codrescu's recipe of success. He has created from a legend a vivid character, from the cliché of libertine an intriguing destiny of a visionary intellectual. Conquer and victim, seducer and seduced, a strong temperament with deliberated weaknesses, Casanova appears in his complexity, as a fiction writer, play writer, philosopher, translator of Italian classics into French, the collaborator with Mozart on Don Giovanni. Codrescu gives back to Giacomo Casanova the gift to be ahead his time, in thought and action. A remarkable book, wonderful written.Carmen FiranWriter and journalist, New York

to be there in the lion's den! Delight!

I dragged this book home like a lion a fresh-killed antelope & set myself down at an unforgettable feast. It's Borges, Eco, and Vonnegut, but hip, new, American -- and beautifully illuminist. As a woman, subject to chills of wonder and amusement, I thought this was first rate entertainment and great literature, too.

"Casanova in Bohemia"

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Casadrescu in Bohemia

On beginning "Casanova in Bohemia," I already hear Andrei Codrescu himself speaking -- only the decor is different: the historical as surrogate for the personal. And on the level of the sentence (the true test of good writing), perceptual short-cuts and dense info-mass come spinning to their ends unloading their trenchant insights and sharp ironies. And that's just Chapter One!