Magyar Baráti Közösség

Re: Sándor Márai: Casanova

Reviewed by Richard Eder, The New York Times
Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Fiction. By Sandor Marai. Translated by George Szirtes. 294 pages. $22. Alfred A. Knopf.

Casanova has escaped and word is out all over Venice. He slipped from the rooftop dungeon where he was imprisoned, ostensibly for swindles and seductions but in fact for dangerously undermining all moral and political governance, the first subversion leading inevitably to the second. He has ridden away to Bolzano and flourishes elegantly out of Venetian reach.

"Ho-ho" and "tee-hee" are heard in the streets. Cows give birth to prettier calves. The pope laughs, since he doesn't care for the instigator of Casanova's imprisonment: the Inquisition. The king of France smiles. There are smiles on women's faces because what an arch-seducer threatens is not their virtue, grazie tanto, but the authority of men.

Thus, in comic-operetta style, goes the start of Sandor Marai's novel of philosophical adventure. Like "Embers," published in English three years ago, "Casanova in Bolzano" is suspenseful, ornate, discursive to the verge of synaptic collapse (ours), and witty to the occasional verge of terror.

Marai was a celebrated novelist in Hungary until the Communists came to power and he emigrated to the United States, where he lived in obscurity until his death in 1989. It was only with the translation and appearance of "Embers" that word of a corrosive talent began to filter out, old-fashioned in style, but prophetic in feeling. Literary kin to the Austrians Robert Musil and Joseph Roth, he wrote in a Central European vein of collapsing worlds and sensibilities, yet with a glimmer not just of a world past but of one looming.

"Embers" is a book of fearful splendor: an account of an all-night duel of memory, taking place in 1939 between two old men over a passion and a crime of 40 years earlier. One speaks; the other is silent. A shadow of moral if not literal annihilation hangs over them, and through them, over the terrible years just ahead.

"Casanova" also has its climax in a kind of three-way duel. Ostensibly it is an individual instance, grandly theatrical, but what propels it is what propels history's larger tragedies: power and passion, the boundlessness of human desire and the cold limits set by time and possibility.

After his operetta overture, Marai, whose writing points to the grave but prances and amuses along the way, performs a series of light preliminary turns. We see Casanova exercising his seductions and laying out his aesthetic rules.

He goes to a Jewish moneylender, and their haggling takes on a chill but airy universality. "One could experience the world only insofar as he could accept it as security, the other wanted all life on credit: happiness, beauty, youth. It was ideas, not amounts, that they were discussing." At his Bolzano inn he uses the maid, Teresa, for a sample seduction; not cynical but detached, he insists, as a work of art might be.

What results is a wonderfully sensual scene with little more than the play of lips upon lips. Teresa is no victim, but manages her own part in what is a game and something more. (None of Marai's women are victims, and all of his games are something more.) When Casanova ventures an overblown endearment it embarrasses her. So it does him, but they reflect that, like a patriotic song, it is a cliché that brings comfort.

The games go on but now they play into the book's heart. Years before, smitten with the beautiful 15-year-old Francesca, Casanova lost a duel with her older suitor, the Duke of Parma. He has struggled to suppress her memory ever since, fearing something graver in himself than a seducer's love. He succeeded - that is, until learning that Francesca and the Duke were
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