All for Love

By Dan Jacobson

Book Overview

A brilliant reconstruction of the operatic--and catastrophic--romance of a Hapsburg princess and a lowly cavalrymanIt was a great European scandal: she was the wife of a prince, the daughter of King Leopold II of the Belgians, and a familiar figure in the court of the aged emperor Franz Joseph. Her lover was Second Lieutenant Geza Mattachich. Ten years younger than the princess, a dashing figure in his fitted tunic and shiny boots, he was an undistinguished subaltern of dubious origin and extravagant ambition. Ahead of them both lay assignations, adultery, flight, the squandering of a fortune (not his; not hers either, as things worked out), a duel, imprisonment, bankruptcy, madness. And, as well, a genuine heroine--in the form of canteen worker Maria Stoger--who was no less ready than the princess and her soldier to risk all for love. With sparkling, satirical prose, "All for Love" moves from one end of pre-World War I Europe to the other. Shuttling between historical fact and fiction, between their time and ours, it evokes a world in which propriety conceals what is predatory, greedy, and corrupt. Long forgotten, Louise and Mattachich have been resurrected and placed, along with their few friends and many enemies, at the center of a drama that is both extravagant and profound."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805081038
• ISBN13: 9780805081039
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Bizzare Love Triangle

I've often heard it said that one's ability to take responsibility for one's own actions is the highest indicator of self-esteem. Don't tell that to the protagonists of this book. Certainly we the readers are entertained by their devastating choices, but it's their inability to relent in the pursuit of the inevitable consequences that fascinates. I can only liken the behavior of these people to the current exploits of Britney Spears. However, I don't think Ms. Spears is as enamored with the acting out of the dramatization of her own saga as much as Princess Louise and her erstwhile lover Mattachich. Once on top of the world, Britney is insistent on degrading herself, but in the pursuit of pleasure. For the lovers of this historical novel, pleasure never really comes into it. I believe the book's titular "love" was never part of their endgame (sorry to disappoint!) They are two united pilgrims of imagination, seeking to discover what lies beyond the strictures of class in Hapsburg Vienna. Once they find it, puzzlingly, they don't stop. They continue on in an intractable gyre of indigence and affliction of their own making, only ending, in this life at least, in death. While on the one hand the reader marvels at their brazen, obscene commitment to finish what they audaciously start, one cannot help but ponder, was it all worth it?