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Reviewed by:
  • Casanova: ‘écrire à tort et à travers’ by Raphaëlle Brin
  • John Phillips
Casanova: ‘écrire à tort et à travers’. Directeur d’ouvrage Raphaëlle Brin. (Rencontres, 158; Le Dix-huitième siècle, 17.) Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016. 204 pp.

The nine papers published in this welcome volume derive from a single day’s conference at Paris–Sorbonne in June 2013, the publication date planned to coincide with that of two new editions of Casanova’s autobiography, L’Histoire de ma vie (one edited by Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), and the other by Jean-Christophe Igalens and Erik Leborgne (Paris: Laffont, 2017)). The volume ends with a substantial bibliography, and abstracts of all papers in both French and English. The subtitle is a quotation from Casanova himself, insisting on movement as a main feature of writing that both avoids fixity at thematic and structural levels and at the same time shuns all notions of ‘right and wrong’. In harmony with the volume’s subtitle and, more significantly, with the character of L’Histoire de ma vie, the volume’s contents are both as beguiling as their subject and as wide-ranging. It is invidious to single out individual examples, except to make the point that the volume offers a rich variety of discussions, ranging from the eroticism of the writing—there is, for example, Françoise Tilkin’s measured exploration of what she calls Casanova’s ‘goût dépravé’, or what he himself terms his ‘grands goûts’—to more recondite while equally fascinating topics: the author’s medical arts (Angéline Dulac), investment (Guillaume Simiand), or his work as a dictionary of [End Page 281] human stupidity (Séverine Denieul) are just a handful among many examples that will hopefully give some sense of the volume’s and therefore the conference’s unrestrained and uncensored nature. These, and indeed all of the other papers published here, are well written, to the point, and possessed of their own fascinating qualities. While the focus of the papers at times, then, shifts between biography and fiction, in much the same way that Casanova does himself in his autobiography, I feel bound to express some regret that the essays do not contain a single reference to Arthur Schnitzler’s biographical and highly entertaining fiction, ‘Casanova’s Return to Venice’ (1930; London: Pushkin Press, 1998). In spite of its fictional basis, Schnitzler’s tale is both entertainingly written and above all believable because springing from an authentic premise. As Casanova himself knew, fiction can be the most effective means of expressing the inexpressible. [End Page 282]

John Phillips
London Metropolitan University
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