The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 77

BOOKS 15 ThB Observer Review 6 July 1997 'He ordered a pizza. Then he ate the delivery boy Fast food with Sarah Dunant, page 16 on wars of the words McCrum first glance, the connections between Alpksflndr Knrzhflknv Kia.Li 7 1 Murray Lachlan Young, James ujw aim xnc iiuuvii may uul eem terribly obvious. So here. taken from almost any recent newspaper, are the clues: General Korzhakov has dished the dirt on his boss, Boris Yeltsin, in a savage, coruscating memoir of life inside the Kremlin; Murray Lachlan Young has upped the price of short poetry lines by landing a cool 1 million advance from EMI; at almost the same moment, Jbyce's'great text, Ulysses, has been the subject of a bitter textual wrangle between the world's Joyce scholars and the publishers of a new 'improved' edition. The row has been made both more raucous and more Complex by the accompanying cries of 'Foul' from the Joyce estate.

And finally, Mr Bilbo Baggins, a gentle hobbit who loved a quiet life if ever there was one, has got himself within a hair's breadth of a costly encounter with m'learhed friends. In short, the book is once again making news, and proving that this low-tech old mefflum still has plenty to offer the society of the new era. Aleksandr Korzhakov, for example, has for months been telling any foreign correspondent who'd listen that his erstwhile boss is a cretinous old drunk, but not until he decided to put these allegations between the pages of a book did anyone sit up arid take much notice. Sim-Uarly Murray Lachlan Young has for sometime been wowing the club scene as a surreal gameshow compere, but it's his book, Vice and Verse, with its inevitable CD and almost equally inevitable disclaimer 'Caution! CD contains filthy language' that's caught everyone's attention. And finally.

Joyce. The neurotic and parsimonious underworld of Joyce scholarship had been seething with micro-textual debate did the great artist favour the use of the semi-colon after 1919, or not? long before the current row over Danis Rose's 'Readers' Edition', but it was not until this scandalous volume actually appeared that the standing army of Joyce scholars began to emerge vitu-peratively from the undergrowth. hi other words, despite the triumph of video, the CD boom, and the daily feeding frenzy on the Internet, it's the book that still seems to count most, the book that commands attention and brings matters to a head. General Korzhakov could have filmed a treacherous video; Lachlan Murray Young could have set-tled for a niod6st CD; and the James Joyce estate could have shrugged off the vandalising infringements of Mr Rose and his publishers. But they chose to do none of these things.

Why? The answer, which lies deep in our culture, says a lot about the kind of society we still inhabit. Never mind cable TV; never mind satellite telephones; step aside the Worldwide Web. The fact is: we are programmed from a very early age to take books seriously and, more importantly, to consider books and their contents as special, almost holy. We revere the word, even as in the case of Murray Lachlan Young the word made tosh. And along with our reverence for the word, goes a ferocious defence of its integrity.

Which is where Tolkien's The Hobbit comes Next to the row over Ulysses, a little-known dispute between some publishers and the Tolkien estate looks like small, Middle Earth beer, but at its heart the same proprietorial feelings towards the Book are just as much in evidence. Here's the story so far: four years ago, Tolkien's longstanding publishers, HarperCollins, made a contract with a certain David Day, the author of Tolkien's Ring, an internationally popular study of Tolkien's mythological world for a Hobbit Companion, to be illustrated by the renowned Dutch artist Lidia Postma. It appears that HarperCollins neglected to consult sufficiently with Tolkien's heirs because the next thing Mr Day knew, he was being sued by the Tolkien estate for infringement of copyright. According to the lawyers, Mr Day had reused Tolkien's invention (the famous Hobbit) 'to its own detriment and his own profit'. Mr Day, of course, trenchantly rebutted this slur but the row rumbled on.

The upshot of a protracted battle with I've no doubt some fault on all sides, was that poor Mr Day was forced into bankruptcy, obliged to find a new publisher, and to face up to the stark fact that when it comes to defending a deceased author's interests (aka royalties) hell hath no fury like a literary estate It's good to be able to report that, in this instance, this sad story has a happy ending, The Hobbit Companion (Pavilion, 14.99, pp92), a whimsical guide to one of the century's great children's tales, a book that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about all the Bag-ginses who ever lived, is to be published, with sighs of relief all round, in about 10 days. If this story demonstrates that the literary establishment, like the political, prefers to keep control of books, then for the crusading individual seized with a zeal for the truth, the book remains the ultimate resort in the settling of scores. Evidence of this comes, I can report, in the news that the full story of Martin Bell's triumph over Neil 'Sleaze' Hamilton in Tatton is being committed to paper for an instant book by my tireless colleague John Sweeney (known to other parts of the Observer as Kurtz). What's more, some Guardian journalists from that other High Court triumph are offering various London publishers a book-length version of their victorious joust with Jonathan Aitken's sword of truth. It will probably make a gripping paperback and it's certainly a story that might make a terrific film Perhaps they should call it 'Ritz.

RODert McCrum is the Observer's literary editor P8V18WS HISTORY OF MY LIFE by Giacomo Gasanova translated by ViardR-Trask Johns Hojdns 66, axvcjlumes i i then Venetian-born 111 Giacomo Casanova I 1 was 11, he attended a if ii lathering with his I if mother at which an I ll English visitor quoted a Latin epigram: 'Discite gram-matici cur musculo, nomina cunnusj Et cur femineum mentula nomen habeV (Teach us, grammarians, why cunnus (vagina) is a masculine noun and why mentula (penis) is After a little thought, Giacomo provided the answer in a perfect Latin pentameter. 'Discs, quod a domino nomina servus habeVQt is because the slave takes his name from his master.) The Englishman embraced the astounding boy several times and gave him his watch. It was this occasion, Casanova writes, that sowed in him the desire for literary fame. In the same year, 1736, he lost his virginity. The two dominant chords in his life had been struck.

Giacomo would like to have specialised in medicine; in modern times he might have become a gifted if somewhat raffish psychoanalyst, for he was fascinated by people's motivations and evasions; but his widowed mother, an actress, secured him a priestly patron who prepared the young man for the church. Graduating from Padua University, he received minor orders. But the spirit of liberty and libertinage soon drew him into a wide-ranging and freebooting life. He moved from city to city across Europe, making fairly shady financial deals which often got him expelled off he would go in his carriage, with the latest mistress beside him. In Paris, he founded the State lottery.

He started a silk business, dabbled in alchemy and homeopathy, played the violin in a theatre orchestra, conversed with Voltaire and Catherine the Great, translated the Iliad. With delicious appropriateness, he helped Da Ponte write the libretto for Don Giovanni. In casinos and bed-chambers, he gambled. Financial deals vie with women in -his Life. 1 have always loved to It is the spending on, orrather in, women which provides an unexpendable richness.

His affairs are the Kochel-numbers of his life: from the gavottes of shadowy couplings with half-reluctant women in carriages to double concertos and even one long operatic intrigue in his native Venice. There are-from a swift survey of these 4,000 pages -roughly 130 K-numbers in Casanova's oeuvres: not an extraordinarily high number for history's supreme, archetypal womaniser (Don Giovanni is, of course, fictional), for Casanova was a gourmet, not a gourmand. There were probably no women at all in the last decade of his life, spent in isolation as the librarian of Count Wald-stein's Bohemian castle, Beginning in the year of the French Revolution, which he detested, he devoted himself to recreating his life in hectic, error-strewn, but vivid French. 'Worthy or unworthy, my life is my subject, my subject is my life If I become wise before I die, and if I have time, I will burn my whole manuscript. Fortunately, he did not become wise.

But fire almost consumed his manuscript when a bomb fell on a Leipzig bank during the Second World War. The original text had never been published; its nineteenth-century editor, an anti-clerical, pro-Revolutionary professor of French, had seen fit to 'improve' the style, euphemise the eroticism, and disguise Casanova's religious and political beliefs. The true text appeared only in the Sixties. The present edition is the first paperback edition of Willard R. Trask's superb translation, published between 1966 and 1971.

The six handsome volumes are helpfully annotated and tastefully illustrated. Apart from all else, they are a Baedeker of eighteenth-century Europe. Nonwithstanding earlier bowdler-isation, Casanova is never pornographic. 'Anyone who goes reviews RACERS by Richard WiRiams Viking 16.99. pp290 i was only after I had watched a grand prix from the stands, rather than the sofa, and.

subsequently, spun a car 360 degrees off a race track that I got hooked on motor racing. When Ayrton Senna was killed in 1994 at Imola, I cried. I had come to understand why he was an extraordinary driver and it was only partly to do with clutch control. In any sport there are those participants who raise the level of everyone's game, and Senna was one of them. Tom Wolfe observed of the sound barrier-breaker, Chuck eager, that he 'pushed out the envelope'.

Senna was another envelope-pusher, compelling armchair racing drivers to watch him work In Racers, the Guardian's Richard Williams (whose The Death of Ayrton Senna, was. he observes, the only posthumous biography of the man 'without photographs') follows a triumvirate of topflight drivers through the 1996 season. There is, of course, no Senna, but the threesome are an mteresting bunch: Michael 'Schumacher, the 27-year-old twice-world champion, who stays late into G.G. a helping hand with her stockings. Photograph: Mary Evans into an even more powerful narrative, his account of his arrest and confinement in the 'Leads', the Doges' prison, and his subsequent astonishing escape.

Tolerant of Damien's brutal execution, he would have shuddered at the vapid, illiterate brutalism of our modem sexual 'culture'. He needed style, wit, intrigue and to experience the greatest pleasure -love. The woman whom he appears to have loved most was a modest, witty and intelligent Frenchwoman called Henriette, met when he was 23. As often happened to him, 'inevitable circumstances' rather than ennui forced fheir separation. Thirteen years later, Casanova put up at a hotel in Geneva.

He saw scratched on the windowpane: 'You will forget Henriette 'I felt my hair stand on he We had stayed in that very room when she parted from me to return to She had scratched the words with a diamond ring he had given her. Writing in old age, he exclaims passionately, 'No, I have not forgotten her, and it is balm to my soul every time I remember He made sure, through this incomparable History, that we don't forget her either. interested him was the private commedia including the way he could make the hitherto convent-cloistered niece 'laugh and blush' as he described, in words and gestures, what had been going on. His erotic imagination was contrapuntal; he loved trios, in which beautiful women pleasured each other as well as, or instead of, him. He devotes the longest, grandest account to an affair in Venice, in 1755-d, with a beautiful nun, who equalled him in possessing a carnality so limitless it becomes a kind of spirituality.

She possibly spoke also for him in saying: 'I did not begin to love God until I had rid myself of the idea of him which religion had given She persuades him to let their lovemaking be watched by her erotic 'tutor', the French ambassador -soon to become a cardinal. Casanova finds himself helpless to prevent the intrigue from developing to the point where it is painful; forced to allow the ambassador to enjoy his Casonova's -longer-lasting mistress, C.C., together with M.M. And Casanova, somewhat illogically, burns with jealously over C.C. Perhaps, after all, here is a touch of masochism. This gravely beautiful 'opera' of Venetian masks and illusions merges During the four-hour event, he notices that another young man present, Tiretta, pressed against the back of stout, middle-aged Madame XXX, has pulled up her dress rather high so as not to step on it, and keeps her 'strangely occupied' for two whole hours.

Amused, the Venetian delicately hides this internal spectacle from Madame XXX's innocent niece, his own more subtly pursued target. Madame XXX later pours out her anger to a sympathetic Casanova; had it been normal intercourse, she implies; it might be forgivable, 'but what the brute did to me is so The brute himself explains to Casanova: 'I didn't know where I was going On Casanova's advice, he obtains Madame XXX's forgiveness by spending a night with her. Casanova describes the episode with zestful humour. He seems entirely unconscious of the underlying horror, and its Sadean implications. For what they were watching was one of the most barbaric executions in history, the infinitely prolonged torture of Damien, would-be assassin of Louis XV.

Every age, though, sees only what it wants to see. At least Casanova had no" prurient wish to describe the appalling scene outside; what 180 mph for a living deserves to be mistress He admits to coarseness, to loving the good smell of a women's sweat as he loves highly seasoned dishes: It is precisely by virtue of my coarse tastes, I have the temerity to believe, that I am happier than other men, since 1 am convinced that my tastes make me capable of more But the comparatively rare specific details are usually delicate; the blend of saliva and oysters, for example, while kissing and dining with a mistress. The very antithesis of porn, his art delights in recording his partner's conversation and changing moods; in anticipation and delay as much as in consummation; in simply contemplating her face. Faces were more important to him than the cunnus. Tf faces were not seen, a man would always remain the constant lover of the first woman who had pleased Though extolling voluptuousness without bounds, he appears to have been 'straight in his desires.

There is no trace of sado-masochism a concept, of course, which had not yet been invented. A single highly uncomfortable scene involves extreme cruelty, but it takes place offstage. Casanova in Paris has hired a broad window, since his Parisian acquaintances are eager to observe a public spectacle. into a corner at the night with his mechanics, fine-tuning his Ferrari; the extravagantly talented Jacques Villeneuve, 24, son of the late Gilles, racing a Williams Renault in his first Formula One season after transferring from US Indycars; and his teammate, 'our Damon' Hill, 35, son of the late Graham, whose journey from Williams test driver into their number-one car, the best in Formula One, took six difficult years. The rivalry is necessarily fierce.

Who has the Right Stuff? And will that Stuff alone be enough to ensure a championship victory? The plot grips like Pirellis on a rain-slicked mountain pass. But even though we all know who dunit, we may not know how. Or even why. Racers gets under the skin of this intelligent, sophisticated and cold-blooded sport, charts the wheeling-deals, salaries (25 milhon a year for Schumacher, 5m for Hill) and the motor-racing fraternities' baroque management. There is also, inevitably, some information about the cars.

Happily, for those of us who love driving and can't change a spark plug, there is nothing too scarily technical. Some of the most fascinating parts of the book are at some remove from the plot. Portraits of the late Juan Manuel Fangio, Bernie Ecclestone (the abstrusely titled vice president in charge of promotional affairs for the Federation International de 1 Automobile) who basically runs the whole show, or 'celebrity mechanic' Nigel Stepney, give intriguing glimpses Lore in Venice Giawmo Casanova gfves his taken seriously' in his OOOk. Photograph by Tom Jenkins into what motivates the kind of men who thrive in this rarefied world. Ultimately, however, the story is of one driver, as Williams observes, 'confronting his own vulnerability and conquering In that respect it is Hill's book.

The prodigal son's progress through the season is fraught. Hill, it seems, is never taken as seriously as his flashier peers, perceived, by press, punters and other drivers alike, to be a journeyman rather than a star (why else would his boss, Frank Williams, sack him while he was leading the Championship in But, star or no, Hill's determination is never an issue: when he heard fans singing 'it's coming home after he won the championship, he hadn't even heard the song. 'I don't know about anything that happened in 1996 except for what I was he said. That's dedication. For most of us, driving 180 mph into a corner is the stuff that video games are made of.

For my money, anyone who does it for a living deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. Hill may not be, by nature, a daredevil envelope-pusher, but there can never be many of them. Richard Williams takes Hill seriously. A sporting tale is never more resonant than when it charts a victory against the odds, followed by redemption. By the end of the book Williams clearly believes that Hill has earned his spurs and become a true champion no longer haunted by the ghost of his brilliant father.

The reader will too. Michael Schumacher, One Of the trio Wifflams follows.