Don Juan de La Mancha or the Education of Lust

»You can only be happy with your first woman or with your last« announces Nathan's father, thus summarizing the seducer's dilemma.

Nathan too is a seducer, albeit in different times. He works as head of the »Life« Department for a Viennese newspaper, conducts an emancipated marriage and an equally emancipated affair and otherwise pays regular visits to his psychotherapist. Whereas Nathan's father sought happiness in women and Nathan's mother found unhappiness in men, Nathan intends to do everything quite differently. But what is it that he is doing differently? Nothing. It is only the circumstances that have changed and people's expectations. Admittedly, he can live out his masculinity to the full but he can no longer enjoy it, thus embodying the melancholy, tragicomic repeat offender of the post-68 generation.

More entertaining and pithier than ever, Robert Menasse paints a portrait of this very generation, his own generation, and a society »that cannot even sell a liter of mineral water without viewing the goods from the erotic angle.« Although his hero gets no nearer to redemption, at the end of this unusual Bildungsroman we find ourselves not only enlightened in a clarified world but also comforted and seduced by tender irony.

»A brilliant picaresque novel« Die Presse

»To be devoured at one sitting« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»With his Don Juan, Robert Menasse has published a fast-paced and marvelous novel, the language is absolutely superlative. […] With a fine ironic tone, as if he had created a cross between Flaubert and Kundera in a contemporary style, all with an underlying light touch. Menasse offers an up-to-date sentimental education for the educated classes in the generation born after the Student Revolt.« Der Standard