What Casanova Told Me - Softcover

Swan, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676975771 ISBN 13: 9780676975772

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2005

Synopsis

What Casanova Told Me links two women’s journeys across two centuries, through a long lost journal. On her way to the Mediterranean, Luce Adams doesn’t expect her life to be much affected by her travels, let alone drastically altered. She’s heading to a memorial service for her mother, Kitty, who died two years earlier in a car accident on Crete, while she was researching Minoan culture. Shy and awkward, Luce has never been able to handle her mother’s adoring circle of academics and goddess-worshippers or her mother’s lover, Lee Pronski, who talked Luce into going on the trip. Following Lee’s itinerary through Italy and Greece on the way to Crete, hitting all of Kitty Adams’s favourite places, only serves to remind Luce of how far she was from the centre of her mother’s life. Despite the efforts of Kitty’s old friends, it’s an emotional distance that no number of healing rites or goddess figurines can help Luce overcome.

The only part of the journey that holds Luce’s interest is her role as a courier, delivering a package of old family papers to a museum in Venice. The eighteenth-century documents — a travel journal kept by Luce’s ancestor Asked For Adams, a manuscript written in what appears to be Arabic, and some precious letters written by Casanova — had been discovered in the family’s cottage on the St. Lawrence, and were recently authenticated by a Harvard expert. Luce, an archivist, was the natural person to entrust with their safe delivery. And as she discovers upon cracking open Asked For’s journal, Luce is also the one person who truly needs to read the young Puritan’s story — not only to get to the bottom of what happened to her ancestor, who disappeared one night in Venice, but also so she can begin to understand what it means to lead a passionate life.

Luce’s reading mirrors our own, as the journal and letters are woven into the novel and give life to the second narrative of What Casanova Told Me. In 1797, Asked For Adams travels to Venice with her father and her intended husband, the stiff and unimaginative Francis Gooch, on a trade mission. Arriving at night by public barge, Asked For is intrigued by the eccentrics they encounter on board — especially a ridiculously wigged old woman named Countess Flora Waldstein. But the charming countess is in fact Giacomo Casanova, disguised to avoid the authorities, and when the two meet up again at Venice’s historic belltower, their destinies begin to intertwine. Upon the unexpected death of her father, Asked For abandons Francis and accepts Casanova’s invitation to join him on a romantic quest to Constantinople. Her travel journal, kept in the style of the French novels that she so admires, tells the rich and exotic tale of their search for great love.

Using Asked For’s journal as a guide, Luce travels through Venice, Greece and Turkey, and begins to see how she can seize experience and come to terms with her mother’s love for her and for Lee. And as the journeys of the two women converge, Luce finds her own way of moving through the world, Asked For learns what it means to live an ideal life, and both discover the brilliance, passion and generous spirit of the great Casanova.

What Casanova Told Me has received rave reviews. The novel was a finalist for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Canada and Caribbean Region, and was picked as one of The Globe and Mail’s top books of 2004. It was also selected as one of the top ten books of the year by the Calgary Herald, the Sun-Times, and Toronto’s NOW magazine. Maclean’s named Asked For Adams one of the five best fictional characters of 2004 and called her “the utterly charming core of Susan Swan’s parallel-track historical novel.”
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

The sixth daring novel from Canada's pre-eminent explorer of the sexual psyche is a dazzlingly imagined story that encompasses transformation, love, archaeology and freedom.
It's 1797, and an aging, lovesick Jacob Casanova enters Venice in disguise on a public barge. There he persuades Asked For Adams, the young Puritan cousin of American President John Adams, to set out with him on a romantic odyssey through post-Byzantine Athens and Istanbul, which she lovingly records in her travel journal.
Framing their adventure is the story of beautiful Luce Adams, Asked For's twenty-first-century descendant and inheritor of her journal, who is on her way to her mother's memorial service with her mother's lover, Lee Pronski. She arrives in Venice full of expectations just as Casanova and Asked For did two hundred years earlier.
Using Asked For's journal as a guide, Luce travels through Venice, Greece and Turkey, and begins to see how she can seize experience and come to terms with her mother's love for her and for Lee. As the journeys of the two women come together, Luce finds her own way of moving through the world, and Asked For discovers how vulnerable the great Casanova was -- a man whose brilliance and generous mind make him a presence that still ignites possibilities.
Excerpt from "What Casanova Told Me
"Luce examined the letters first, untying the ribbon with her long skilful fingers. The staff at the Sansovinian would be pleased: not a drop of twenty-first-century moisture marred the paper bearing the watermark of the famous Italian printer Fabriano. The letters were written in French and Italian in a dramatic, eighteenth-century style. . . .

"From the Hardcoveredition.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Wives of Bath:
Lost and Delirious, the feature film based on this novel was released in 32 countries and featured at the Sundance Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival.

"Underneath the ribald, gothic tale of adolescent sexual awakening lies the dark, impenetrable web of gender paradox, made taut by the tension between what a young woman is, what she wants to be, and what society would have her become."
--The Gazette (Montreal)

"Each compelling plot twist comes as a shock and a surprise [and] grips and doesn't let go, until the truth is exposed."
--New York Newsday

"Singular modern panache and rare poignancy. . .extremely funny; rare verve and flare."
--The Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Canada
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0676975771
• ISBN 13: 9780676975772
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336