A seductive meditation on love and life

Posthumous fame -- if only the person could be alive to enjoy it. That is the knot at the center of the lives and reputations of Giacomo Casanova and Sandor Marai, both of whom were well known in their times but conscious that their real fame would be in posterity.

There really is a vivid, compelling Casanova (1725-1798) lurking behind the tired contemporary phrase, “he’s a real Casanova.” He celebrated his own life and loves in 12 volumes, “History of My Life,” now readily available in Willard Trask’s brilliant translation. Every page of the memoir dances with undiminished life, but it is never for the censorious: “As for women, I have always found that the one I was in love with smelled good, and the more copious her sweat the sweeter I found it.”

Sandor Marai returned to the living realm of necessary world literature in 2001 with the gratifying success of the English version of his novel “Embers.” It was as if a shaft of sunlight had suddenly revealed a great cloud-obscured mountain. A Hungarian author whose work includes 18 novels, numerous plays, memoirs, thousands of newspaper articles and now this inviting translation of “Casanova in Bolzano,” Marai provides a deft compliment to the genius of Casanova unlike the slightly dated versions of Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig.

Marai died by his own hand in San Diego in 1989, bereft of his country, of his wife, of all his immediate family, of his eyesight and of the hope that Hungary would ever be free of the Russian occupation. The irony that the Russian occupation ended the following year just as his profound “Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948” was published wouldn’t have been lost on Marai -- nor would the reappearance of his “Casanova in Bolzano” in America at this truly unappetizing moment in history, though today is a little less desperate than the years of its writing and original publication, 1938-1940.

In “Casanova in Bolzano,” Casanova and a monk companion have made a daring escape from the doge’s prison in Venice. Making their way to Bolzano, they are resting in an inn waiting for funds to continue.

Hearing of the presence in town of the wife of the Duke of Parma, Casanova is reminded that he was nearly killed by the duke in a duel over this woman. A note from the wife is delivered to Casanova by the duke himself. A masquerade ball is arranged. The duke’s wife appears in Casanova’s room. She is dressed as a man and Casanova is dressed as a woman. Although what happens is unexpected, it is the formal daring of Marai’s art through his fully realized characters’ epigrammatic monologues that becomes our reason for reading and rereading this novel.

Outwardly conventional, Marai gleefully gives life to his version of Casanova and this richly and provocatively fleshed out moment (less than a page in the actual memoirs of Casanova) that, finally, is a daring meditation in the form of disguised monologues on the meaning of love, of seduction, of the fragility of ever-threatened civilization, borne aloft by a stiletto-pointed sense of language eased by a vein of sly humor.

Marai gives both the wife and the duke the really good lines, as when the duke is talking about his wife’s writing to Casanova: “The point at which someone reveals their true feelings to the world is like making love in the marketplace in perpetual view of the idiots and gawpers of the future; it is like wrapping one’s finest, most secret feelings in a ragged parcel of words; in fact it is like having the dogcatcher tie one’s most vital organs up in old sheets of paper.”

But the final imagined complex sentiments of Casanova could be our recommendation: “There are only two divine medicaments to help us bear the poison of reality and prevent it from killing us prematurely and these are intelligence and indifference.... But it is not the business of a young fiercely beating and grievously wounded heart to understand it.”

“Casanova in Bolzano” cleanses the palate and returns us to the life-restoring power of, as Marai puts it, “loud full-bellied laughter.”