Volume 8, Number 4 · March 9, 1967
Our Man in the Eighteenth Century?
By F.W. Dupee
History of My Life
by Giacomo Casanova, by Chevalier de Seingalt, translated with an Introduction by Willard R. Trask
Harcourt, 679 pp., $7.50
Casanova's Histoire de ma vie is one of the most exhilarating of narratives; it is also one of the most mystifying. Like some enormous bird, the last of its fantastic species, the Histoire comes to us encrusted with scars yet still proudly levitating in a hostile atmosphere, still holding its own against those who would ensnare and bring it down. The scars are the many doubts cast upon the winged monster by biographers and critics. They have had reason to doubt it: the book is a strange bird.
Review, 5429 words
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