Name: Casanova's Return to Venice
Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9781908968708

Arthur Schnitzler

An ageing Casanova longs to return to Venice after a life of exile, but the desire for women proves too strong. A brilliant psychological portrait two days in the life of the most famous seducer and free spirit, by the author Sigmund Freud called his alter ego.

Casanova's Return to Venice

In Arthur Schnitzler's poignant novella, Casanova's Return to Venice, the famed gambler, adventurer and seducer Casanova has been reduced to melancholy, unhappily civilised by age. "His yearning for Venice, the city of his birth, grew so intense that, like a wounded bird slowly circling downwards in its death flight, he began to move in ever-narrowing circles." One of Schnitzler's most poignant evocations of the passing of time and the ironies of sentiment and love, Casanova's Return to Venice tells the story of an ageing Casanova's desperate desire to return to the city he truly loves after a life of exile; a desire which is contrasted with his still-libidinous and sensuous - yet weary - pursuit of women, money and prestige. Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Return to Venice is translated from the German by Ilsa Barea, and published by Pushkin Press.

Tim Pendry

Written in 1918 and usually translated as 'Casanova's Homecoming' (a title which better captures the tone of the story), this novella by Arthur Schnitzler is written in prose that, as the useful translator's note at the end states, is 'immaculate, lucid and elegant'. The story is a simple one - Casanova is late middle-aged, no longer at the peak of his powers and finds himself in Mantua drawn back to his Venice after an enforced absence of over two decades and prepared to do almost anything to return home. The rest of the story is a picture from within of an amoral individualist within an aristocratic 'shame culture' and prepared to do anything to meet his desires, even if they are waning and certainly not caring whether they are destructive. The story grips as a psychological portrait until about two thirds of the way through when we are forcibly reminded that Schnitzler was primarily a dramatist and the plot becomes a theatrical strategem. This strategem gets the story where the author wants it to be taken but it lessens the psychological tension and moves us into a literary formalism that loses us some what has been gained in the previous 120 pages. The momentum is lost, the inner life of Casanova becomes that of any other wilful sociopath and the story ends somewhat peremptorily though not in a way that requires me to offer a spoiler. Still, the novella is well worth reading for the early insights into the mentality of an aging sex-obsessive whose powers are waning and for superb story telling that engages us in the place and the time.

The greatest of all lovers comes back to his greatest love

Casanova's Return to Venice

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