Memoirs, Volume II (Translated) (Annotated)

This edition includes:• New English translation• Critical introduction• Notes to the textCasanova’s Memoirs are one of the great self-portraits in European literature: a life of gamblers, salons, tribunals, theatres and love affairs, told by a narrator who can mock his younger self even while reliving his triumphs. Open the book and you enter a world where wit is currency, desire is a wager, and every conversation may become an adventure.This second volume carries him from Corfu and the aftermath of an affair back to Venice, where he leaves the army, takes up the violin, and falls in with the patricians who will alter his fortune. From there the road runs through Italian courts, Parisian salons, Dresden and Vienna, past countesses, courtesans, princes and philosophers. Love, money and reputation are negotiated in the same breath; a rescue, a marriage and a spell of cabbalistic theatre become scenes in a larger education. Casanova observes it all with irony, tenderness and an anatomist’s curiosity about his own illusions.This edition offers a literary translation made to be read today: natural, alive English that follows Casanova’s shifts between comedy, tenderness and irony while keeping faith with the substance, voice, tone and images of his text. The result is a Casanova who sounds like a brilliant talker across a supper table—quick, theatrical and candid about his contradictions. A critical introduction opens the volume.Add this volume to your library and let one of literature’s most irrepressible narrators draw you into a classic that still speaks to our appetite for freedom, pleasure and the stories we tell about ourselves.