From Publishers Weekly
Set in the mid-18th century, Dutch author Japin's elegant second novel (after
The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi) richly imagines the plight of Casanova's first youthful heartbreak. Lucia is 14 and a servant girl in a noble house in Pasiano, Italy, when she first meets the young seminarian visitor Giacomo Casanova, who is as virginal as she. They fall into a frolicsome love affair until Lucia contracts the dreaded smallpox. Horribly disfigured from the disease, she concocts a story to turn Giacomo away and flees her home to embrace adventures across Europe, in turn working as a servant, a secretary to an enlightened woman philosopher, and a prostitute, who "learned to accept what other women found intolerable." Years later, having reinvented herself as Galathee, a well-heeled madam in Amsterdam, she finds a mysterious liberation in the use of a veil to attract her clients and meets Casanova again, now the practiced seducer le Chevalier de Seingalt. Their mature affair is conducted in the form of a cynical wager, and they dance rhetorically around the tender feelings of their youth. Despite the awkward conceit of the prostitute's veil and the sometimes stilted language of this translation, Japin has incorporated Casanova's
Story of My Life to beguiling effect.
(Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
From Booklist
Japin, author of
The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi (2000), offers another historical novel, this one narrated by Casanova's first great love, Lucia. Lucia, the daughter of the groundskeeper and his wife at an estate in Italy, is only 14 when she meets Giacomo Casanova, but their passion, though chaste, is undeniable. When he leaves the estate after an extended stay, they are engaged, but tragedy intervenes when Lucia's beloved teacher falls ill with smallpox and passes it onto Lucia herself. She survives, but her face is horribly scarred and she believes that Giacomo is better off believing she has betrayed him and run away with another rather than learning the truth about her disfigurement. Mourning her great love, Lucia leaves the estate, finding work first as a servant for a wealthy couple, then as an assistant to a wealthy countess, and finally as a prostitute in Holland. When her path unexpectedly crosses with Giacomo's, she debates revealing the truth to him. Japin's second novel is a moving study of an ill-fated but enduring passion.
Kristine HuntleyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
