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What Casanova Told Me

by Susan Swan

British writer George MacDonald Fraser is famous for his antihero Flashman, a womanizing, cowardly cad who
stumbles through some of the most important historical events of the 18th and 19th centuries, concerned only with saving his own skin and bedding his share of lusty maids. Susan Swan, in her latest novel, has created Asked For Adams, a late-18th-century American Puritan turned feminist/hedonist who bucks the social mores of the time to become the renowned Casanova’s travel companion and lover as he treks through post-Byzantine Athens and Istanbul.

Asked For’s story is told through diary entries and letters that have been entrusted to her 21st-century descendant, Luce Adams, a Toronto archivist. As a feisty, female anti-Flashman, Asked For is an appealing heroine – what she lacks in roguishness she makes up for in conscientious philosophizing (what Swan’s Casanova refers to as “a charming interest in self-improvement”). This directness of thought is manifest in the diary form itself, in which she records daily a “Thoughtful Inquiry of the Day” and “Lesson Learned.” Casanova’s letters are also rife with the wry idioms of a lovable, enlightened rake. Part travelogue, part bodice-ripper, there is something both titillating and fantastical about this type of historical fiction, and Swan is adept at spinning facts into vividly imagined scenes and characters.

It is the shaky outer scaffolding of the novel that disappoints. Luce Adams becomes obsessed with her ancestor’s journals en route from Venice to Greece, where she is to attend her mother’s memorial service. Along the way, she attempts to come to terms with her grief, her resentment toward her mother’s lover Lee, and her own yearnings for a deep and satisfying love affair. Unfortunately, these contemporary passages lack both psychological cohesiveness and the robust energy that drives the Casanova thread of the novel. Luce is constantly searching for a quiet corner – away from Lee, apart from her own life – in order to immerse herself in Asked For’s more colourful story. I often found myself attempting the same.

 

Reviewer: Heather Birrell

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 328 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-676-97576-3

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2004-9

Categories: Fiction: Novels