Books In Brief

Casanova in Bolzano by Sándor Márai (Knopf, 304 pp., $22). In 1756 Giacomo Casanova escapes from a cell under the ducal palace's lead roof in Venice, making his way in the tattered remains of a silk suit, to the small town of Bolzano. Arrogantly, confidently, he commandeers the finest room in the local inn and sits down to think on the sixteen months erased from his life by his imprisonment: "Alone, excluded from the world, in the name of virtue and morality, of which I am the sworn enemy--or at least that is what the messer grande said when he had me arrested."

So Sándor Márai begins Casanova in Bolzano, his novel originally published in 1940, in Hungary where he had been one of the most celebrated authors of the 1930s. Márai and his work were both rejected by the postwar Communist regime. He left, ending up in San Diego, California, where he eventually committed suicide at age eighty-nine in 1989. Three years ago, an English translation of his Embers appeared, a sad, wise, witty tale of two old men discussing a crime and a passion from forty years earlier.

Now, in Casanova in Bolzano, Márai tells of a hero positively brimming with energy and fire. Has he lost his touch? Leisurely he kisses little Teresa, the maid with rough, red hands coarsened by work, who barely can raise her eyes to his. No, he has not lost his touch. After three days he wonders, "Can she be the One?" The One he has ever been questing after.

But the One may be Francesca, over whom Casanova and the duke of Parma fought a duel by moonlight when the young woman was only fifteen. Casanova fell to the duke's sword, and the duke wed Francesca. The duke, a much older man, has been consumed by the conviction that his young wife still loves his seductive rival, and comes to the inn with a strange proposal, bringing with him a letter she has written to Casanova: I must see you.

Instead of killing Casanova, the duke makes the famous seducer an offer: He will reward him most handsomely if Casanova will spend one night making love to his duchess--and then somehow hurt her just enough to cure her of her romantic illusions.

The last third of the book is the meeting at a costume ball, Francesca dressed as a slim gallant, and Casanova more sad than comic in an elaborate ball gown. Francesca asks, "How does one seduce and then disabuse someone who has come of her own free will because she is in love? . . . I am very curious, Giacomo! What will you do?"

The duchess talks through the night and as dawn comes, she takes her leave: "I saw you, I was tender to you, and I hurt you." Adjusting her three-cornered hat on her wig, she adds solicitously, "I hope I did not hurt you too much." Which is not quite the last word of this vivid, clever, worldly book.

According to Knopf, a number of Márai's novels are in the process of translation--this one, by George Szirtes, is first rate--and we shall have the pleasure of discovering more of a lost world.

--Cynthia Grenier

The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon (Fourth Estate, 131 pp., $16.95). All the way back in 1912, Ronald Knox wrote a parody of European scholarship called "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes," and in the decades since, Arthur Conan Doyle's creation has been the subject of more parodies and pastiches than anyone can count. Fortunately, Michael Chabon hasn't written one. Or, rather, he has. But The Final Solution is something far more: a tiny, perfectly constructed novel that explores what it would be like to be an old, old man--and a genius faced with one last puzzle. A long-scheduled review of the novel for The Weekly Standard never materialized, but it would be a disservice to let this work go without notice. I gave several copies away for Christmas, with the note, "This is a real book, for a change." Real books--genuine novels, with all that implies--are extremely rare these days. Read this one. Don't let it slip away.

--Joseph Bottum