Word: charlatan
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What a brilliant subject for a Fellini movie-and what a disappointing treatment of it. Seducer, charlatan, scribbler, dabbler in black magic, Giacomo Casanova was that most magnetic of figures, the legend with nothing lofty about him. Born in a glittering Venice that was rife with disease and intrigue, he was equally at home in scenes of Watteau-like elegance or Hogarthian stench. He roamed the capitals of Europe, living by his wits, his nerve and a nice instinct for when to get out of town. He dreamed up mining schemes and lotteries, supported himself at the card table, survived...
Still, Carter is fond of quoting Danish Theologian Soren Kierkegaard that "every man is an exception," a view that certainly fits him. He has been described with a catalogue of contradictions: liberal, moderate, conservative, compassionate, ruthless, soft, tough, a charlatan, a true believer, a defender of the status quo, a populist Hamlet...
Astrology, after all, eventually led to astronomy, just as alchemy (which For man also dabbled in) laid the ground work for chemistry and physics. Forman may have been foolish, but he was not a charlatan. The Elizabethan epoch was one of rich contradictions; it is impossible to comprehend that time merely by reading its high literary work. As Rowse shows, men like Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare transcend their age; Forman embodies...
...volatile, self-inflated character remains as elusive on the last page as on the first. Terminal questions linger: Did conditions create the man, or did he create events? Was he a gifted charlatan, or Moses redivivus? It is only certain that he appeared and disappeared as if on celestial cue, leaving his work to more stable founders and builders. Unhappily, as this biography reluctantly demonstrates, the man was all too human-a naif, a hack and a monomaniac. Probably a touch of madness ran in his blood: two of his three children were suicides; so was his only grandchild...
Blaise is pompous, and a bit of a charlatan. His personal life is grotesque as the novel begins and rapidly grows more so. His trustful, loving wife Harriet, by whom he has a teen-age son, at first knows nothing of foul-tempered Emily, his mistress of nine years, nor of Luca, Emily's eight-year-old son by Blaise. He swindles time to visit Emily by saying that he is visiting a difficult nocturnal patient named Magnus Bowles...