Rating: 
Summary: "Casanova in Bohemia"
Review: << When I began reading this novel, I heard Andrei Codrescu speaking through his surrogate, Casanova, craftily fusing the historical with the personal. Though the historical decor and events portrayed differ from our own time, the poltical intrigues and erotic fevers are as contemporary as the latest scandal sheet. Codrescu's language, especially when puncturing platitudes and pomposity,is a joy to read. It manages to weave a delicious body of info-mass at the level of his sentences which spin to their ends unloading their cornucopia of insights and ironies. A real page-turning pleasure!>>
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Summary: casanova is back!
Review: Casanova in Bohemia is a brilliant and absorbing work, gifted with intellectual wit, historical facts, tenderness, humor, magic - a combine Codrescu's recipe of success. He has created from a legend a vivid character, from the cliché of libertine an intriguing destiny of a visionary intellectual. Conquer and victim, seducer and seduced, a strong temperament with deliberated weaknesses, Casanova appears in his complexity, as a fiction writer, play writer, philosopher, translator of Italian classics into French, the collaborator with Mozart on Don
Giovanni.
Codrescu gives back to Giacomo Casanova the gift to be ahead his time, in thought and action. A remarkable book, wonderful written. Carmen Firan
Writer and journalist, New York
Rating: 
Summary: Sophomoric Fumbling
Review: Codrescu's work in this book is like a 13-year-old's self-conscious attempt at writing a romance diary. The first sentence alone is as unacceptably ill-wrought as the rest of the writing is embarrassingly over-wrought. Codrescu is a great writer and he should be ashamed. Yikes and yuck.
Rating:
Summary: Sophomoric Fumbling
Review: Codrescu's work in this book is like a 13-year-old's self-conscious attempt at writing a romance diary. The first sentence alone is as unacceptably ill-wrought as the rest of the writing is embarrassingly over-wrought. Codrescu is a great writer and he should be ashamed. Yikes and yuck.
Rating: 
Summary: Depressingly, Dolefully Decadent
Review: Giacomo Casanova, 1725-1798, was a real person, an adventurer, a man-about-Europe, a celebrity, a sociopath, rarely worked, attached himself to famous people and institutions, spent time in prison, and had a number of notorious romantic affairs. If he had lived today he would undoubtedly be a frequent guest on talk shows. Now after many years of obscurity, Casanova has had a revival of sorts, and a following of scholars known as "casanovists." Andrei Codrescu's book, based loosely on the facts of Casanova's life, details the declining years of Casanova, against the backdrop of European history. It is a time of spectacular decadence, the last days of a crumbling feudal aristocracy, the shock waves of the French revolution, and the personal decline of the once notorious Casanova, a man who has had many romantic escapades but has never formed a lasting relationship with a woman. Now he is lonely, disillusioned, desperately trying to achieve immortality through his writings. And in a way, as the author shows, he does. I love listening to Andrei Codrescu on National Public Radio, but Casanova in Bohemia was something of a letdown. This book will be of interest to casanovists and also to codrescuites, but it is not for everyone. If you enjoy reading about the sexual preoccupations and embarrassing orgies of a lonely old man you might enjoy it.
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Summary: Codrescu's Best
Review: Having followed Codrescu's career with abnormal attention over the last twenty five years I have wondered when he would get busy and write his classic. This book finally tips into the mythos. I liked his first two novels -- Blood Countess and Messiah, but here Codrescu opens a panorama of a zeitgeist that somehow still survives from the faded glamor of Venice. "I lived as a philosopher. I die a Christian!" Codrescu is the last of the Draculas -- but his confession that he believes in a Creator makes me ask whether his Dracula mask hides a deeper engagement with the one true God. It is this civil righteousness whose warmth permeates this book and implicitly creates an urban ecotheology based on vials of beautiful blood straight from the nubility of Lutheran Prague. -- Kirby Olson
Rating:
Summary: Offended
Review: I did not appreciate this book very much. I felt that the sexual content was inappropriate and overdone. More could have been given to the plot and the historical content and less could have been given to an 80 year old man's perverted exploits. I was dissappointed in this book completely.
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Summary: to be there in the lion's den! Delight!
Review: I dragged this book home like a lion a fresh-killed antelope & set myself down at an unforgettable feast. It's Borges, Eco, and Vonnegut, but hip, new, American -- and beautifully illuminist. As a woman, subject to chills of wonder and amusement, I thought this was first rate entertainment and great literature, too.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but-
Review: I have loved Andrei Codrescu's nonfiction for many years, and am always pleased to hear him on NPR. This is the first work of fiction by him that I have read. Casanova in Bohemia is a fascinating book. I liked, and was grateful for Codrescu's obvious and careful research. I have always thought there was more to Casanova, but was not compelled to do my own research. The characters are well drawn, particularly Laura, Casanova's maid and muse, and the settings are vivid. My one "objection" is to the final section of this good book. I did not find the last section of the book, a time travel episode, to be very pleasing. To me, it rang a little hollow. I am glad I read this book, however.
Rating:
Summary: Casadrescu in Bohemia
Review: On beginning "Casanova in Bohemia," I already hear Andrei Codrescu himself speaking -- only the decor is different: the historical as surrogate for the personal. And on the level of the sentence (the true test of good writing), perceptual short-cuts and dense info-mass come spinning to their ends unloading their trenchant insights and sharp ironies. And that's just Chapter One!
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