Viking £14.99 pp294

In a small town in Italy in the middle of the 18th century, a group of local women gather outside the bedroom of an inn and spy on its new inhabitant sleeping within, who, far from being beautiful, boasts a face “serious and ugly”, a masculine face, “lacking beauty and grace”. Their gradual apprehension that “here was a man who was genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more, the way an oak tree is just an oak tree and a rock is simply a rock”, provokes in them a reaction almost orgasmic in its intensity and sensuality, as their breathing becomes shallower and their hands fly to their breasts.

And nor is the stranger’s effect confined to those who are brought into such immediate contact with him; within days of his coming, a house has burnt down, a vineyard owner has killed his wife in a fit of jealousy and a woman has run away from her husband. Bolzano is electrified, energised — but what extremity of charisma can set in motion such a chain of events?

The women’s reaction seems to denote that the man’s power lies in his simplicity, and certainly Giacomo Casanova’s reputation — for he is the new arrival, having recently pulled off a daring nocturnal escape from the ducal prison in Venice — rests largely on the singularity of his purpose, to entrap and seduce and use to his own ends as many women as possible. During the course of this discursive, meditative novel, Sandor Marai attempts to give us a more complex man, one whose enslavement to the imperatives laid down by his character has made him an embodiment of the subtle distinction between amorality and immorality.

Unsurprisingly, Marai chooses to frame his reworking of the Casanova legend around the theme of the return of the exile: this, too, was the central organising principle of Embers, the novel that was first published in Britain two years ago to great acclaim, and it was also the dominant theme in Marai’s life, as exile from his native Hungary led him first to Italy and then America, where he eventually committed suicide in 1989. In Embers, two men whose friendship has suffered a cataclysmic shock finally meet after 40 years; here, Casanova comes face to face, after a shorter gap, with the Duke of Parma, over whose wife Francesca they had fought a duel five years previously.

Marai’s Casanova is a fascinating and richly achieved creation: repellently vain and careless of others, unnervingly well adapted to the use and abuse of kindness and generosity, equipped with an apparent hotline to his victims’ weaknesses. And yet he also displays an acute self-knowledge that is almost insanely fatiguing and an innate compassion that he strives to suppress; his lengthy “conversation” with the duke, which forms a large part of the novel, is a captivating exhibition of rhetoric and counter-rhetoric, as each man attempts to establish the truth of their relationship and of each other’s power.

It is in the final exchange with Francesca, however, that Marai really delivers Casanova’s claims of invulnerability their death-blow and demonstrates that perhaps all the world’s greatest lover really needed was a woman who would call his bluff.

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