In his first novel, Ingenious Pain, Andrew Miller told the tale of a man who felt too little; in his second novel, he features a man who feels too much. Set like its predecessor at the end of the 18th century, Casanova in Love follows the fortunes of that legendary lover whose name is now synonymous with womanizer. Miller drew parts of his story from Giacamo Casanova's own Histoire de Ma Vie, and indeed the novel begins in the German castle where the real magilla spent his last years writing his autobiography. There, as the now elderly and frail adventurer burns letters and papers, he is interrupted by a mysterious woman who has come to hear the story of one particular era in his past:

Imagine him now: thirty-eight years of age, big chin, big nose, big eyes in a face of "African tint," a guardsman's brawny chest and shoulders, stepping down the gangplank in Dover harbour.... In the customs house he gave his name as de Seingalt, the Chevalier de Seingalt, a citizen of France. Lies, of course, or something like them, but it pleased him to dream up names for himself; it was also politic. Europe--the parts of it that counted--was a small place, and in his travels he had met at least half the people of influence in the entire continent. "Casanova" was in too many documents, too many secret reports and in the minds of too many people he would rather not encounter again. After many years spent adventuring on the Continent, Casanova has come to England to find peace, "a span of quietude in which to find himself again; serenity." But he is not the kind of man who can long endure solitude. Soon he has started to accumulate acquaintances. One of them is the great Samuel Johnson; another is Marie Charpillon, a high-priced courtesan who becomes both his obsession and the cause of his eventual downfall. In an age when everyone is reinventing himself, Casanova attempts several guises--laborer, writer, country gentleman--in order to win his paramour, only in the end to come face to face with a darker self stripped of all artifice.

In tracing the course of his character's doomed love affair, Miller takes the reader on a graphic tour of 18th-century London from the glittering soirées of the well-to-do to the filthy flophouses of back street slum-dwellers. This might have been the Age of Enlightenment, but there are still many dark pits of misery and ignorance in this imagined universe. Miller tells his tale of obsession in cool prose that describes in intimate detail his characters' thoughts, and actions, the smells and tastes and textures they encounter, the humiliations and heartbreaks they suffer, yet from a certain detached distance. But in the world that his fictional Casanova occupies, love is a commodity and one with a high depreciation rate at that; in such a world, a little distance is singularly appropriate. --Alix Wilber


From Library Journal
Mais non, this is not the Giacomo Casanova we have come to expect. Miller (Ingenious Pain, LJ 1/97) gives us a 38-year-old Casanova, soul-sick (midlife crisis, they'd say today), gone to England in 1763 to try to revive. There he is befriended by the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson and thrown under the spell of young, beautiful Marie Charpillon. Casanova's maddening attempts to win her continuously fail despite money owed him by her family; frustrated, he tries life as an onion-eater (that is, a laborer), a Grub Street hack, and a squire of a dank country estate. Sometimes funny, sometimes grim, these side trips are the best parts of the book; the section on the underclass would have done Dickens proud. A framing device that allows Casanova hindsight works less well and seems appended only for its rhetorical purpose. On the whole, though, as a trip back in time with a celebrity cast, this is a winner.?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NYCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Lorna Sage
Miller's Casanova, ingeniously translated to our own fin de siècle, is a New Age narcissist--so observant, so chastened, that self-love can save him after all.


From Booklist
Casanova in love? It seems like an oxymoron in regard to one of history's most infamous sexual adventurers, but that's the premise of Miller's second novel. Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, an old man very near the end of his life, is busy burning letters. But he finds he cannot burn those of Marie Charpillon. Casanova is 38 when he meets Marie, a pretty but rather unremarkable girl who is closely surrounded by female guardians: her mother, her grandmother, and several aunts. Perhaps because of her inaccessibilty, Casanova finds himself in the unaccustomed role of frustrated suitor, taking extreme measures both to seduce Marie and to get her out of his system. He is never quite sure who she is and where he stands with her. Is she an innocent or an experienced seductress? Does she love him as she claims, or is she merely making a fool of him? As he did in his first novel, Ingenious Pain, Miller does a fine job with his eighteenth-century setting. Mary Ellen Quinn


The Seattle Times, October 25, 1998
"[Andrew] Miller, significantly, challenges our traditional notions about [the] legendary figure [of Casanova] by giving us not the triumphant sensualist, but a man who at 38 has lost his touch. This is a Casanova who no longer takes the pleasure in bed-hopping that he once did; an adventurer on the verge of middle age for whom love has become 'a game, an itch, a false kind of money;' a cosmopolitan at the end of his tether 'who has done everything but who has nothing.' "Even as he de-mythologizes Casanova, Miller uses him to probe the contradictions of English character as only an outsider could observe them: 'Every man felt free to criticise the government in terms that would ensure his arrest in Venice, and yet the great lords here had more power than any in Europe. Foreigners were hated and Jew-baiting worse even than in the territories of Germany, but London was full of exiles who thrived in all manner of business.' This odd combo of grumbling and power-worship, xenophobia and laissez-faire, could just as easily describe England today. "The central truths of 'Casanova in Love,' however, apply to more than one country - and feel as true in 1998) as 1763. After every moment of youthful glory, the book suggests, comes a loss of confidence and a downward tug of gravity (in all senses of the words). And it's then that you find out what sort of soul you are and how much feeling of futility you can bear...[Miller] sure gets it painfully and hilariously right."


Detroit Free Press, December 6, 1998
"Andrew Miller's lush, enthralling new novel is a wonderful companion to...Lydia Flem's stunning, intense biography 'Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women...' Miller, too, makes one of the 18th Century's most intriguing figures a vivid, memorable presence... Miller evokes Casanova's amazingly complex life and paints a scintillating, evocative, erotic portrait of the 18th Century and one of its major figures."


Book Description
In 1763, at the age of thirty-eight, Giacomo Casanova arrives in England seeking a respite from his endless travels and liaisons. Before long, though, the lure of a pretty face proves too hard to resist, and Casanova reverts to his old ways as he pursues the dazzlingly beautiful Marie Charpillon. But is he the hunter, or the hunted? Soon we see a different Casanova, a man who may himself be the quarry as Charpillon and her family focus on his fortune. Andrew Miller, whose Ingenious Pain, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was embraced by readers and reviewers for its marvelous imagination, paints a fascinating portrait of a decadent society in which youth and beauty form a precarious but powerful currency. A poignant and often comic portrait of a complex, charismatic man, Casanova in Love confirms the presence of an outstanding new novelist.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Adventurer, charlatan, musician, practitioner of the medical and kabalistic arts, Freemason, con artist, memoirist, spy, and above all, seducer of women, Giacomo Casanova (1725 - 1798) is one of the most extraordinary characters of the 18th century. The son of Venetian actors (his published assertion that his real father was Venetian nobleman would result in his second, and permanent, exile from the Republic), Casanova became the consummate actor of the age, extemporizing a lifelong performance that won him access to the highest social levels in the courts of Europe. His acquaintances included such worthies as Benjamin Franklin, the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, Catharine the Great — even Pope Clement XIII, who conferred upon him a knighthood in the Papal Order of the Holy Spur. In all, the astonishing record of his life — thoughtfully transcribed by Casanova himself in his autobiography, HISTOIRE DE MA VIE — so nearly resembles the stuff of fiction that it is difficult to know just where the historical truth begins and where it ends.

Little wonder then that few novelists have attempted to enlarge upon Casanova's version of events. That singular accomplishment belongs to English author Andrew Miller, who in CASANOVA IN LOVE undertakes an inspired psychological portrait of the legendary Venetian seducer and the Age of Enlightenment that created him.

Miller, who memorably immersed readers in the turbulent scientific, philosophical and social upheaval of the 18th century in his 1997 debut novel INGENIOUS PAIN, focuses on a crucial episode in Casanova's career —onethat Casanova himself recognized as the turning point in his life: His arrival in England in 1763, seeking respite from the excesses of his rake's progress.

—Greg Marrs

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this captivating novel, the famed Venetian seducer and adventurer, Giacomo Casanova, relives a turning point in his life. In 1763, at the age of 38, he arrives in England seeking a respite from his restless travels and liaisons, to revive his jaded palate, and to shake off the lugubrious moods that have begun to trouble him. Before long the lure of company proves too hard to resist, and the dazzlingly pretty face of the young Marie Charpillon even harder. Casanova's pursuit of the elusive bewitcher drives him from exhilaration to despair and to flirt with the roles of laborer, writer, and country squire as he attempts to reinvent himself. Here lies a far more complex, fascinating figure than legend suggests, a charismatic man who, for all his conquests, begins to doubt his worth and purpose. It is a scintillating, poignant, often comic portrait, conjuring a decadent society in which youth and beauty formed a precariously finite currency. Following Andrew Miller's acclaimed and prize-winning debut, Casanova in Love confirms the presence of an outstanding new novelist.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Mais non, this is not the Giacomo Casanova we have come to expect. Miller gives us a 38-year-old Casanova, soul-sick (mid-life crisis, they'd say today), gone to England in 1763 to try to revive. There he is befriended by the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson and thrown under the spell of young, beautiful Marie Charpillon. Casanova's maddening attempts to win her continuously fail despite money owed him by her family; frustrated, he tries life as an onion-eater (that is, a laborer), a Grub Street hack, and a squire of a dank country estate. Sometimes funny, sometimes grim, these sidetrips are the best parts of the book; the section on the underclass would have done Dickens proud. A framing device that allows Casanova hindsight works less well and seems appended only for its rhetorical purpose. On the whole, though, as a trip back in time with a celebrity cast, this is a winner.
-- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga County Public Library, Syracuse, New York

Lorna Sage

Miller's Casanova. ..is a New Age narcissist -- so observant, so chastened, that self-love can save him after all.
-- New York Times Book Review

John Elson

. . .[S]tylishly recounted. . .has the picturesque grunge of a Hogarth sketch.
-- Time

Detroit Free Press

"Andrew Miller's lush, enthralling new novel is a wonderful companion to...Lydia Flem's stunning, intense biography Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women... Miller, too, makes one of the 18th Century's most intriguing figures a vivid, memorable presence... Miller evokes Casanova's amazingly complex life and paints a scintillating, evocative, erotic portrait of the 18th Century and one of its major figures." -- Detroit Free Press, December 6, 1998

Seattle Times