Quantity:

More Buying Choices

39 used & new from �6.00

Have one to sell? Sell yours here

The Story of My Life (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

by Giacomo Casanova (Author), Gilberto Pizzamiglio (Introduction), Stephen Sartarelli (Translator), Sophie Hawkes (Translator) "I begin by informing my reader that for everything good or bad that I have done throughout my life, I am certain I have always..." (more)

4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

RRP:	�12.99
Price:	�8.58 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save:	�4.41 (34%)
	o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Want guaranteed delivery by Tuesday, November 10? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details

29 new from �6.37 10 used from �6.00

Other Editions:	RRP:	Our Price:	Other Offers:
Hardcover	�25.00	�25.00	8 used & new from �11.48

Frequently Bought Together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Casanova: Actor, Spy, Lover, Priest

by Ian Kelly

5.0 out of 5 stars (2) �6.47

Of Mistresses, Tigresses and Other Conquests (Penguin Great Loves)

by Giacomo Casanova

�4.99

Casanova [2005] [DVD]

DVD ~ Peter O'Toole

4.7 out of 5 stars (34) �13.98

Casanova [DVD] [2005]

DVD ~ Heath Ledger

3.8 out of 5 stars (8) �5.98

Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved

by Judith Summers

�7.19

› Explore similar items

Product details

Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: Penguin Classics; Reissue edition (7 Feb 2002)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0140439153
ISBN-13: 978-0140439151
Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.8 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 89,827 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories:
#1 in Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > C > Casanova, Giacomo
#18 in Books > Biography > Political > Countries & Regions > Italy
#25 in Books > Biography > Historical > Countries & Regions > Italy

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Product Description

Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbuckler, poet, self-made gentleman, bon vivant, Giacomo Casanova was not only the most notorious lover of the Western world, but a supreme story teller. He lived a life stranger than most fictions, and the tale of his own adventures is his most compelling story, and one that remained unfinished at the time of his death. This new selection contains all the highlights of Casanova's life: his youth in Venice as a precocious ecclesiastic; his dabbling in the occult; his imprisonment and thrilling escape; and his amorous conquests, ranging from noblewomen to nuns.

About the Author

Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was born in Venice, the son of actors who wanted him to become a priest. Instead he had numerous occupations, and is remembered as one of history's great lovers. Stephen Satarelli is a poet and translator of Italian and French literary works. Sophie Hawes is an artist, printmaker, and translator. Gilberto Pizzamiglio is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Venice.

Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
I begin by informing my reader that for everything good or bad that I have done throughout my life, I am certain I have always earned due approbation or reproof, and must therefore consider myself a free man. Read the first page

Explore More
Concordance

Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

(What's this?)

Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)

women

venereal disease

sex lies

sex

pua

pick-up

memoirs - correspondence - interviews

lover

italy

italian literature

in the mediterranean

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	77% buy the item featured on this page: The Story of My Life (Penguin Classics) 4.3 out of 5 stars (3) �8.58
	9% buy Casanova: Actor, Spy, Lover, Priest 5.0 out of 5 stars (2) �6.47
	7% buy History of My Life: v. 1 & 2 5.0 out of 5 stars (3) �13.05
	4% buy History of My Life (Everyman Library Classics) 5.0 out of 5 stars (1) �13.99

Explore similar items

Customer Reviews

3 Reviews

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sex and violence, 25 Jun 2003

By A Customer

The eight volumes of the great Venetian adventurer's memoirs are here reduced to a palatable 500 pages, and the result is a breathless and exhilirating read.

Casanova is a by-word for libidinous excess, and the book is full of his sexual athletics, ranging from his deflowerings of virgins, his bizarre encounter with a fake castrato, his fun with nuns, his liaisons with noble women and actresses, as well as his more unsettling predilections, some of which would have led to his inclusion in the child protection register today. But unlike other 18th-century chronicles of excess, the memoir is not merely pornographical. Casanova was a highly educated and cultivated figure. He bests a bemused Voltaire in discussions of poetry, and his chronicle is full of witty commentaries on 18th century geo-politics, human relations, metphysics, and art. He writes with superb humour. His descriptions of his periodic resort to alchemical and cabbalistic confidence tricks to defraud rich patrons and mistresses are hilarious. He recounts with delicate irony a rather serious conversation with a muslim theologian on the moral conundrum of masturbation. And his portraits of the movers and shakers of the age are lively, vivid and frequently irreverant.

Casanova was a controversialist. Imprisoned for obscure reasons in Venice, he recounts his daring escape and enforced exile. His frequent scrapes as a spy, adulterer and con artist make his exile an increasingly precarious affair, as he drains his stock of patient patrons dry. As the work progresses, his infamy precedes him, and Casanova roves across Europe, expelled from capital after capital. The work climaxes with his account of a duel with a senior Polish officer, leading to his expulsion from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which Casanova had fictionalised earlier as "The Duel". The tale is a locus classicus of 18th-century chutzpah, fool-hardiness, scandal and back-biting spite.

This is one of the great autobiographies. The extraordinary adventures of Casanova in themselves would divert the most thrill-hungry reader. But Casanova himself, apt to exaggerate and sometimes to appal, amoral and moralistic by-turns, Enlightened and reactionary, makes a novel, exhilirating, taxing, hilarious, companion.

The translation is reasonable, if, very occasionally, clunky, and the selections read well. The only real criticism is that the editors have shorn the account of much of its political intrigue, sometimes divesting Casanova's frequent encounters with the authorities of context. While this is a shame, and the editors underestimate readers' interest in this aspect of Casanova's milieu, it only marginally undermines one's enjoyment of this unique life.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Who is that fat pig?", 3 Sep 2008

By	Nicholas Casley (Plymouth, Devon, UK) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Casanova provides his readers with a twelve-page preface, which he wrote "because I want you to know me before you read me. Only in coffee-houses and inns do we converse with strangers." Giacomo would like to be more than a stranger to his readership and with these expurgated memoirs - I write of the Penguin edition - he more than succeeds. "I expect friendship, esteem and gratitude from my readers."

But who was Casanova? We all know his reputation, but what many people are not aware of are his great literary and intellectual interests. Often described as the world's first pure celebrity, he has reason to be remembered in a large number of areas of cultural pursuit. But more than anything, these memoirs demonstrate Casanova's sheer humanity: he is so full of contradictions.

They commence with his first memory, aged eight, and the strange events that attended a bleeding nose. But whilst he may have seemed a late developer in some respects, he demonstrated precocity at an early age. At eleven, he is already responding wittily in Latin to the lewd query of a visiting Englishman. In his late teens, and already a priest, he is cavorting with a number of women from both the underclass and the aristocracy, including a suspected castrato and girls aged eleven and twelve. But throughout the descriptions of his love-making he consistently claims that, "The sight of the pleasure I gave always made up four-fifths of my own."

In whatever scrapes he instigated, Casanova often employs clever wit or innocent humour to extricate himself. And despite the sympathy that his writing imbues in the reader, his is not by any means a wholesome character. As well as the continuous sexual infidelities, he freely admits thefts and frauds practised upon the weak-willed as well as the strong.

The roll-call of the famous people he met and with whom he conversed throughout his life is impressive, and for this reason alone his memoirs are a valuable insight into eighteenth-century European politics and social mores. Priest, soldier, businessman, writer, philosopher, libertine, swindler: there is so much to this man's life-story.

Casanova is a master of language. But the description of his imprisonment under the leads in Venice and his subsequent escape are quite confusing. And yet his sexual adventures can often be quite explicit. His words are replete with epigrams: "To reason well, one must be neither in love nor angry, for these two passions make us like wild beasts"; "A prejudiced intelligence reasons poorly"; "A people without superstition would be philosophical, and philosophers never want to obey."

Casanova remembers long and involved conversations from many years ago. I often wondered about their veracity. Their telling must be tainted by subsequent experiences, and yet the words he places into the mouths of his protagonists are not at all wholly sympathetic or flattering to him, so they must at least claim a kernel of truth. Later he tells us that, "I spent part of the night and the next writing down the three conversations I had with him [Voltaire]." The editor, in his introduction, explains that Casanova carried "great bundles of notes" with him. But where did Casanova keep his notes so safely whilst travelling the length and breadth of Europe?

And there is so much humour too! From the doctor who welcomed his return to town as he had made so much money from curing venereal disease the last time Casanova was there, to his asking a portly gentleman-stranger about a rather porky lady: "Who is that fat pig?", Casanova asked him. "Why, the wife of this fat pig" came the reply! Casanova is a good raconteur and such good company to the reader. His views about the results of the Empress Maria Teresa's urge to rid Vienna of the seventh sin are most amusing, as is his clever riposte to her son about the selling of titles.

Between chapters, the editor seeks to give some flavour of the parts he has omitted. But what appears inexplicable is that one of those parts includes his fateful years with Henriette, who the editor himself describes as "beautiful, cultured, intelligent, and witty, she aroused deeper feelings in Giacomo than perhaps any other woman." Another unfortunate gap appears in his return from Poland, where the visit to his mother in Dresden is omitted, as is his removal from Vienna, and his expulsion from Paris.

One of the most shameful aspects of this Penguin edition is the complete lack of an index. And the notes by the editor are not to be trusted either. Concentrating on the notes to Casanova's visit to London (chapter twenty), the editor is wrong about Saint James's Palace being totally destroyed by fire; Sophie-Charlotte was the wife of George III, not George II; and the three kingdoms are England, Scotland and Ireland (not Wales). There are more errors, and Penguin should make strenuous efforts to correct these if it wishes to maintain its reputation. (This edition was originally published by Marsilio in 2000.)

But the editor's introduction is good, providing the context for the writing of Casanova's autobiography. He explores Casanova's literary style - part history, part novel - and how he seduces his reader to be part of his circle of friends. He admits that providing an edited version of Casanova's vast memoirs is an almost impossible task as "the paths one might take are obviously very many". There is the standard Penguin `Note on the Text' as well as an explanatory note from the translators.

But why did Casanova stop writing them when he reached the year 1774, when he would have been fifty? (He lived to 1798.) Casanova wrote that, "Nature must abhor old age", for whilst age can easily procure pleasure, it can never give it. And yet, whilst his physical appearance might no longer tempt the ladies, his writings continue to provide pleasure to his readers centuries after his death.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sad and funny and sexy, 14 Jun 2006

By	cherry - See all my reviews

This book is so full of life I half expect to find it dancing around on my bookshelf. And it has so many merits that it is difficult to know where to start: essentially it is an account of a vanished period in time, and of different places, and a man who squeezed five times as much into his life as any normal human being. If only half the stories in it are a quarter true - well, the mind boggles: nuns, secret assignations, midnight gardens, transvestites. Quite apart from the astonishing adventures, it's a moving and sad account with a strong underpinning of philosophy. And in its way it's a morality story: sleeping with lots of women (and some men) really doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. If you haven't tried Casanova before this lively edition is a good place to start: you may well want to move onto the Willard Trask epic once you've finished this, but it would be a bit much to bite off at the beginning.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 3 customer reviews...

.jsOffDisplayBlock { display: block; } .jsOffDisplayInline { display: inline; } .jsOffVisibility { visibility: visible; } .jsOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jsOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jsOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; } .jsOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jsOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jqOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jqOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jqOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jqOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jqOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; }

Customer Discussions

This product's forum

Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight

Active discussions in related forums

Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
fiction What book could you not put down, and finished all in one go?	153	6 hours ago
biography A book for a man who doesn't usually read?	9	6 hours ago
fiction Help! Looking for book ?? please	3	7 hours ago
fiction Books that started well and finished disappointingly	26	8 hours ago
fiction Have you ever been so absorbed in a book that you lost all track of time and where you were?	20	8 hours ago
fiction Why should I read Steven King?	48	8 hours ago
biography Reading and Chocolate?	35	18 hours ago