![]() ![]() Trask-to some 12 volumes long (or 4,289 pages), judging from the evidence of Volume 1, this author didn’t need extraneous description or pointless expositions to pad it to such elephantine girth. Though History of My Life runs-in the 1966 National Book Award-winning unexpurgated English translation by Willard R. Having been an actual person, he is arguably more, arguably less than that more for having lived a life so richly-plotted, so fit for being fictionalized less because with that life in hand, Casanova did not have to invent so much as did Cervantes in Don Quixote or Fielding in Tom Jones truth furnished the necessaries to compel interest on its own, for in the faculty of strenuous living, few rival him, and in that of translating memory into prose, even fewer. I f History of My Life ( Histoire de ma vie) were a novel, the character of Giacomo Casanova would instantly take his place as one of fictional literature’s most fascinating creations. ![]() The author’s death in 1797 prevented completion of the work, which was only published in partial, bowdlerized form until the recovery of the original manuscripts allowed for publication in French of the first complete edition in 1960. ![]()
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