History of My Life, Vols. 11 & 12
Trask has written a version in an English fully contemporary yet remarkably Italian in sensibility. With admirable restraint and refinement, he has conveyed the zest and sensuous delight of the original.(National Book Award Citation)These memoirs are compulsive reading... they are the work not only of a highly accomplished seducer but of a literary artist of the highest talents.(J. H. PlumbNew York Times Book Review)Some of the most beautiful spines I have ever seen appear collectively on the six-volume edition of Casanova'sHistory of My Life.(Mary CreganFinancial Times)Trask expertly rendered this text into English in 1966, and his is the English version to read... Compulsively readable... Certainly, few books better convey the sheer, exuberant joy of being alive and young than these reminiscences.(Michael DirdaNew York Review of Books)Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th-century Europe. He ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace. He is superior to all other erotic writers because of his pleasure in news, in gossip, in the whole personality of his mistresses.(V. S. Pritchett)The Chevalier de Seingalt was a most remarkable man, who had some of the qualities of greatness... Has any novelist or poet ever rendered better than Casanova the passing glory of the personal life?—the gaiety, the spontaneity, the generosity of youth: the ups and downs of middle age when our character begins to get to us and we are forced to come to terms with it; the dreadful blanks of later years, when what is gone is gone. All that a life of this kind can contain Casanova put into his story. And how much of the world!—the eighteenth century as you get it in no other book; society from top to bottom; Europe from England to Russia, a more brilliant variety of characters than you can find in any eighteenth-century novel.(Edmund Wilson)Now at last we can enjoy the wonderfulHistory of My Life... as if we were reading an entirely new book... Few more extraordinary men have ever lived; an no memoirist gives us a more vivid impression of the social background of his period(Peter Quennell)