Casanova's Homecoming: Restored Classics to Go Edition

· Otbebookpublishing
Ebook
153
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

At fifty-three, exiled in Mantua and aching to return to Venice, Casanova is a diminished man: poor, restless, and nursing a bitter manuscript attack on Voltaire while waiting for a pardon that may never come. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance, Olivo, diverts his flight and leads him toward a country house where memory, vanity, and desire will collide. There, the past greets him in the warm figure of Amalia, but the true shock is Marcolina, a cool, brilliant young woman whose passion for mathematics and indifference to Casanova's fame expose his aging pride. As he tries to dazzle her with stories of former triumphs, Casanova instead finds himself undone by lust, humiliation, and jealousy, especially when he glimpses Marcolina's secret meeting with Lieutenant Lorenzi at dawn. What follows is a furious inward collapse: fantasies of blackmail, self-mocking rage, bitter reflections on immortality and decay, and an obscene hatred of beauty's inevitable ruin. Elegant, unsettling, and deeply psychological, this opening reveals a legendary seducer confronting the limits of wit, memory, and desire. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
At fifty-three, exiled in Mantua and aching to return to Venice, Casanova is a diminished man: poor, restless, and nursing a bitter manuscript attack on Voltaire while waiting for a pardon that may never come. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance, Olivo, diverts his flight and leads him to...

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About the author

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian writer and physician born in Vienna in 1862, a city that shaped both his sharp social insight and his fascination with the hidden currents of modern life. Trained in medicine before turning fully to literature, he became one of the most distinctive voices of fin-de-siècle Europe, capturing the elegance, anxiety, and moral uncertainty of a society on the brink of change. His fiction and drama are celebrated for their psychological precision, elegant style, and fearless examination of desire, memory, illusion, and the fragile boundaries between public respectability and private longing. Schnitzler was especially attentive to the inner lives of his characters, often revealing how self-deception and social convention can distort human relationships. His work remains strikingly relevant today because it speaks to questions that still feel urgent: how we construct identity, how power shapes intimacy, and how people navigate loneliness beneath the surface of sophistication. He also wrote with unusual clarity about sexuality, mortality, and the unease of modern existence, making him a key precursor to later psychological literature and drama. Read now, Schnitzler offers both a portrait of a vanished world and a deeply contemporary understanding of the human heart. Readers who enjoy subtle psychological fiction, elegant prose, and morally complex characters are especially likely to find him compelling.

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian writer and physician born in Vienna in 1862, a city that shaped both his sharp social insight and his fascination with the hidden currents of modern life. Trained in medicine before turning fully to literature, he became one of the most distinctive voices of fin-...

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