Casanova in Bolanzo - on Playaway Author:Sandor Marai Playaway is the easiest way to listen to a book on the go. An all-in-one format, the player and content are combined in one 2 ounce unit and it comes with everything you need to start listening immediately. No separate player needed, no CDs, no downloads just press play! — "At midnight on October 31, 1756, Giacomo Casanova -- yes, that Casanova ... more »-- escaped from a Venetian prison with help from a defrocked friar named Balbi. But instead of continuing to Munich, as his memoirs record, he stopped at an inn called The Stag in the Italian village of Bolzano. There he rested, secured a loan from a friend, and resumed his old life of seduction and debauchery.
Or so Sandor Marai's account goes. Written within the framework of historical reality, this riveting novel chronicles a scoundrel's downfall. Events past and present intertwine: the memory of a duel over a beautiful girl, a Duke who once spared Casanova's life, an intercepted love letter, an offer the notorious lover can't refuse. Richly realized, full of psychological tension, dazzling in its period detail, this novel joins Embers in re-establishing Marai as one of the world's greatest literary voices.
Sandor Marai was born in 1900 in Kassa in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the 1930s, he rose to fame as one of Hungary's leading literary novelists. Profoundly antifascist, he survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drove him out of his country in 1948; first to Italy, then to the United States. The author of a significant body of work, which Knopf has translated into English, Marai commited suicide in San Diego in 1989."« less