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The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

by Jan Potocki, Ian Maclean (Translator)

4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 · rating details · 808 ratings · 91 reviews

It is 1739 and Alphonse van Worden, a Walloon officer serving the King of Spain, spends the night in a haunted inn in the Sierra Morena where he is plunged into a series of adventures, by turns mysterious, erotic and nightmarish. Convinced that he is being hunted by the Inquisition, he joins a band of wanderers - including a gypsy chief, a geometer, a cabbalist and the Wan...more

Paperback, Penguin Classics, 631 pages

Published March 7th 1996 by Penguin Group (first published 1813)

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Oct 08, 2011 William rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poland, translation, fiction, 20-ce

Unlike many so called classic texts I have read this one doesn't seem to have dated much. At least not in its first half. The writing is thought by scholars to have begun about 1809. As Salman Rushdie says in an attached blurb "...it reads like the most brilliant modern novel." I think that might be an effect of the recent English translation offered here that seems to give the text such a contemporary feel, like a modern-day historic novel.

The premise is that in the 1760s a Walloon officer name...more Unlike many so called classic texts I have read this one doesn't seem to have dated much. At least not in its first half. The writing is thought by scholars to have begun about 1809. As Salman Rushdie says in an attached blurb "...it reads like the most brilliant modern novel." I think that might be an effect of the recent English translation offered here that seems to give the text such a contemporary feel, like a modern-day historic novel.

The premise is that in the 1760s a Walloon officer named Alphonse (commissioned by Philip V) while traveling on leave in Andalucia, for centuries an Islamic land until the Reconquista, finds himself skirting a realm of ghosts, phantoms, specters, kindly bandits, storytelling gypsies and cabbalists. Because he does not at first succumb to the erotic offerings of these creatures--he has a very obnoxious sense of personal honor--he is able to preserve enough presence of mind to chronicle the many weird goings on.

The book is full of the so called Magic Realism used by Garcia Marquez and Rushdie himself. There are stories nested within stories nested within stories. The narrative is very straightforward. The characters wake up, go out, have dinner, come home, have sex, go to sleep, get up in the morning, and so on, and all of this action occurs during the briefest passages of text. There is the sense of the action moving full-tilt, almost out of control, but never really. It is only the impression created by the author's highly compressed style.

Among the treats offered by the narrative are vast underground hideouts carved out of the stone, sun-scorched landscapes à la Don Quixote, convincing erotic encounters between men and women, abrupt murders, sometimes by the score. At a haunted inn phantoms show up at the stroke of midnight, though it is not known from whence the tolling comes. A motif of two men hanged on a gibbet, supposedly brothers of the bandit Zoto, who tells his story here, recurs throughout the early pages. At night the men leave the gibbet and get into mischief.

There are strange elixirs to be drunk, seeming transportations through time and space, usually during a dream. On the whole the book a kind of onieric wonderland where men are men and women are women of a thankfully extinct old school, except when they're murdering succubi who only wish to eat young men because of the wonderful effect their blood has on the demonic constitution.

Then the Walloon officer succumbs, as he must, to the charms of the two Muslim women, who from the start have told him they are his cousins. A man who watches their erotic encounter sees only Alphonse sexually intimate with the two hanged men. From then on Alphonse seems to take some leave of his senses and is never sure if those Muslim women are his cousins / defacto wives or not. He sees them here in a pair of gypsy sisters, there in two women walking in the desert, but again it's not them. Later, he casts caution to the wind when he goes to meet them in an underground chambre d'amour. Who can blame him? It's either go insane or enjoy great if perhaps demonic sex with hot sisters!

In the meantime the gypsy leader tells his story, the geometer or mathematician tells his, the Wandering Jew tells his, the two Muslim "cousins" tell theirs, the male cabbalist tells his, the female cabbalist tells hers, and so on. All of the characters seek to tell stories that seem realistically within their realm of competence/experience. It is only the geometer's tale that seems to falter in the mid to late stages. One gets the impression that author Potocki had committed himself to a line of disquisition that he could not sustain. An astonishing novel of enormous complexity that is nevertheless highly readable, even difficult to put aside when sleep calls. Please read it.

PS. Some time later I began reading Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk. It seems unlikely that it was not a model for Potocki.(less)

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Sep 20, 2010 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror-disguised-as-literature, surrealism-dada-classics

Am I allowed to fully love a book I have never finished? A twisting gothic story cycle of tales within tales(and then within tales again) Kind of an updating of 1001 arabian nights and Dante's Divine Comedy(or the Decameron or Canterbery tales)for the age of reason(?!)Filled with ghoulish horror and lots of duels, weird intrigue, kabbalah, ghosts, hidden treasures, and lots of stories. If you are a fan of Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, Robert Irwin'...more

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May 23, 2012 nathan added it

He wanted 1001 nights, but couldn't find it, so he wrote it.

5 likes · like · see review

Aug 11, 2010 Drew rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've never been a particularly fast reader and this book was consumed in the smallest of sips until I was stuck in hospital for a week and swallowed the last 300 pages in one gulp.
Jan Potocki sounds like a character that Jan Potocki would invent: nobleman, warrior, diplomat, poet, lover, etc., etc. According to legend he shot himself with a decorative strawberry from the top of his silver sugar canister. Each day he filed away at it for a few strokes and when it was through he settled his bills...more I've never been a particularly fast reader and this book was consumed in the smallest of sips until I was stuck in hospital for a week and swallowed the last 300 pages in one gulp.
Jan Potocki sounds like a character that Jan Potocki would invent: nobleman, warrior, diplomat, poet, lover, etc., etc. According to legend he shot himself with a decorative strawberry from the top of his silver sugar canister. Each day he filed away at it for a few strokes and when it was through he settled his bills with a silver berry.
Of course, this story isn't part of the novel, but it might as well be. The whole story cycle is wrapped in various layers of narrative: a anonymous French officer who discovers the eponymous manuscript; Alfons von Worden, the young Flemish nobleman on whom the story centres; and the various other protagonists whose stories we are party to.
Initially the book delivers well on creepiness and ghoulish goings-on, but as it advances it becomes increasingly earthbound, or rather earth-scouring and delving, because we are dragged from the caves and mountains of Andalusia to Madrid, the New World, North Africa, Sicily and Spain, the Hapsburg empire, Egypt, Palestine and beyond.
All the while we hear are stories of the "I was born the first son of a grandee in the largest town in Murcia" kind. They are on some level formulaic, but also charming with a lightness (or complete absence) of characterisation. Here action is all.
I don't know if the above qualify as reservations, but I would certainly not recommend this book to everyone. It packs a massive amount of stories into a relatively small space, has a density that might not be everyone's cup of tea, and follows a relentless course through metaphysics, cabala, Islam, picaresque, Gothic horror and adventure novel. It's also a fascinating meditation on romanticism and anti-modernity that only reveals its true colours very late in the game.
If that doesn't put you off, by all means give it a go. You could be pleasantly surprised. (less)

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Aug 02, 2011 Steve Sewall rated it 5 of 5 stars

There's a fine film, The Saragossa Manuscripts, championed by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, that captivated me when I saw it in 1968. But the film is a smidgeon of the book, a what awaits readers .

I concluded after two readings of this book that it is humanly impossible to grasp it on a single reading. Like many other great writers, Potocki wrote to be reread. His reader must be sufficiently entranced after a first reading want to find out what lies at its heart - indeed, to see if it even...more There's a fine film, The Saragossa Manuscripts, championed by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, that captivated me when I saw it in 1968. But the film is a smidgeon of the book, a what awaits readers .

I concluded after two readings of this book that it is humanly impossible to grasp it on a single reading. Like many other great writers, Potocki wrote to be reread. His reader must be sufficiently entranced after a first reading want to find out what lies at its heart - indeed, to see if it even has a heart, or a main idea. The book is that quirky, that convoluted, that hard to take in as a whole. So it was in this exploratory spirit that I began my second reading. Today I can say this: when reread with care - my copy's every page is dotted with notes and links from one page to the next - and when reread with a view to getting Potocki's take on ALL of the societies his book depicts - I gained a rich understanding, nation by nation, of the entire Mediterranean world of the late 1600's. This includes the complex interactions of diverse strains of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. (Potocki, as a Polish diplomat, was intimately famkiliar with most all the countries depicted in his book. The man even visited Mongolia! And his disquistions, in the person of the eccentric "geometer" Velasquez, on philosophy ("Don Leibnitz"), science ("Don Newton") and religion in the 37th and 39th chapters, are wonders of lucid summary.)

As a student of the novel, I say that Saragossa, still largely ignored by novel scholars, belongs on the same shelf with greatest half dozen novels ever written. This includes Don Quixote, which immerses its reader into just one culture, that of Cervantes' early 17th century Christian Spain. On this score, Potocki makes Cervantes look parochial. And he does so on stylistic grounds as well. Where Readers today must accommodate their ears to the formal rhythms of Cervantes' pure Castillian language, Saragossa, by contrast, and notwithstanding the extent to which it too immerses readers - plunges them headlong - into the Castillian Spain of Potocki's time. In so doing, it offers readers, as I said above, a panoramic view of the entire Mediterranean world, with each of its distinct 66 stories unified by the themes of heroism, love and nobility.

These are Cervantic themes, and I think the case be made that their exposition in Saragossa is worthy of the creator of Don Quixote. Like Cervantes, Potocki maintains a serene detachment from any one culture or faith. And he does do, in part, by virtue of his dextrous and hugely innovative use of an ostensibly involuted novelistic form: that of the frame story: of stories within stories and (for Potocki) stories within stories within stories. So how, then, does Potocki manage to pull his readers along from one story to the next? The answer, I think, is that no story teller before or since has advanced his action in prose as graceful and steady as his. This straightforward, crystalline prose is as fresh to readers today as a piece in the New Yorker magazine. One can only marvel at its exquisite observational capacity, nothing short of cinematic. The man had a mind like a camera. (One of the quirks is that this book, in which Spanish culture is a primary concern, was written in French by a Pole. But fear not: Ian Maclean's tranlation in English, published by Penguin, has the lean, clean feel . . . of Spanish!).

BTW, a fine companion book to Saragossa is Karen Armstrong's Battle for God, about the rise of fundamentalist strains of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that began (she argues) in Castillian Spain in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. A great, essential and supremely timely book.(less)

4 likes · like · see review

Wayne Steve,
your review may be short but it should win converts to this tome. I'm one!!
Karen Armstrong is a very interesting writer too.
Just WHEN am I goin...more
updated Feb 10, 2009 07:07pm

Steve Sewall Thanks, Wayne. Let me know how Saragossa goes with you. It's weird and wondrous at the beginning, smooth and sinewy in the middle with its 60 or so st...more
Feb 11, 2009 11:19am

Wayne Hi Steve,
You certainly rewhetted my appetite with your description of Potocki's book. I am just surprised I haven't heard of it before.But I'm glad I...more
Feb 12, 2009 04:08am

Sep 13, 2008 Cailin rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read this for my senior seminar in college; the topic of the course was Possible Worlds. It was accompanied by a little too much Leibniz. Regardless, the sometimes exhausting tome was amusing, a little scary, and had a pleasing POINT... to those of us who love the labyrinth of literature and the idea of stories in life, as well as print.
The characters, time period, and setting are all quite interesting; the plot too, is compelling. But what makes this book GOOD is the execution of something m...more

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Feb 12, 2008 Jake Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Story lovers, fans of wacky, trippy fun.

I recently got engaged. My fiance's family has a love for this book, so I figured I should read it before going down to spend Thanksgiving with them last year. There are moments in life where stars allign, the world comes into relief and you feel the comforting hands of kismet massaging your shoulders. If these people loved this book then we were going to get along just fine.

This book is astounding. If you love stories, good old-fashioned yarns, this book should be bumped to the top of your read...more

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May 03, 2011 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Potocki brought a little bit of everything to this book of tales within tales within tales: gothic horror, bildungsroman, swashbuckling adventure, picaresque reminiscent of the great Lazarillo de Tormes, philosophical and theological exposition, libertine erotica, political intrigue, travelogue—in other words, a true olla podrida of styles, narrated in an arch, dry, and ultra-witty voice that has been admirably delivered from the French original by the English scholar Ian Maclean. The Manuscript...more Potocki brought a little bit of everything to this book of tales within tales within tales: gothic horror, bildungsroman, swashbuckling adventure, picaresque reminiscent of the great Lazarillo de Tormes, philosophical and theological exposition, libertine erotica, political intrigue, travelogue—in other words, a true olla podrida of styles, narrated in an arch, dry, and ultra-witty voice that has been admirably delivered from the French original by the English scholar Ian Maclean. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, discovered by a French officer during the Napoleonic seizure of the eponymous city, is ostensibly the diary recorded—over the course of sixty-six story-filled days—by Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer on his way to Madrid to join an elite regiment of the Spanish monarch. Honour-bound to make his way through the wild, rugged, and ominous Sierra Morena—a range home to fearsome bandits, gypsies, Moorish refugees, and, portentously, evil spirits and demons in service to the Archfiend—the straight-laced Alphonse, deserted by his frightened servants, determinedly lodges himself in an abandoned, haunted hostelry close to a ghastly public gallows—Los Hermanos—from which dangle the hideously disfigured bodies of two local sibling bandits. From this fateful decision the young caballero will find himself spending the next sixty-six days being regaled, tested, tempted, and discomfited by a parade of characters and entities that he encounters as he journeys through the shadowy vales and gnarled peaks of northern Andalusia; ranging from a pair of lascivious muslim sisters/succubi, to a one-eyed, emaciated automaton whose mind has been claimed by the mountain's madnesses, to the Geometer Velásquez, whose quiet and decent autodidact father—a man robbed of his dukedom and his soulmate by his eloquent and cunning Frenchified brother—provides what is perhaps the most moving and resplendent of the novel's many monologues.

This is an immensely entertaining and thoroughly readable book. It becomes apparent that Potocki must have originally planned TMFIS to lean more towards the gothic horror stylings of works such as The Monk, only to subsequently steer his literary vessel away from such benighted waters and into the brighter streams of enlightenment naturalism, philosophical speculation and roguish adventure. Although this does not detract from the superb quality of Potocki's writing, it does, in my opinion, cause the story to lose some of its wonderful sense of mystery and eeriness. This transformation occurs around the time of the appearance of the verbose Gypsy chieftain—a central figure to the stories, one who functions as a hub around which the other tales encircle and entwine. The accumulation of stories range from the Old World to the New, from the ancient realm which witnessed the birth of Abraham through to the first half of the eighteenth century, though a majority of the action takes place in a beautifully and majestically rendered Spain in the waning days of the Habsburg dynasty. The way that characters and plot-lines in the various tales interact with and encounter each other—guided by the mischievous hand of coincidence and the stentorian hand of fate—proves eminently enjoyable for the reader; and the breathless declarations of love, the amorous encounters, the dashing swordplay, cunning intrigues, faithless abandonments, and devilish temptations—often pitting stoic and taciturn Spaniards against their more emotional European brethren—rush the reader headlong through the sixty-six days of historic, apocryphal, and cryptic reminiscences.

In the introduction, Maclean acknowledges that several critics have complained about the ending that Potocki fashioned, about the sense of letdown in the author's method of tying up all of the various story lines and loose threads. Indeed, Potocki had written different, and differing, drafts of several of the daily chapters, and it is still debated whether the current edition represents the definitive assemblage of the Polish polymath's imaginative fiction. However, such complaints overlook the sheer readability of The Manuscript. Surrounded as I am by bookshelves, every wall bearing tomes that haunt me with the knowledge that, were I to live two lives, I might not make it through all of them, I often found myself tempted to abandon this collection of tall-tales to move on to more meaty fare; and yet, after telling myself I would partake of just one more story, I would inevitably get drawn in, held rapt while the hours whistled by and another week in textual time had passed—hours in which not the slightest trace of boredom could insert itself into page after page of crackling, razor-honed wit. That, to me, is the ultimate testament to an author's greatness: when he has drawn you once within his literary bear hug, you cannot resist the continual desire to go back for another until that melancholy moment arrives when there are no more embraces left for him to give.(less)

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Jan 07, 2009 Ned rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

this is my third read of this in ten years. A rarity, that.
Timeless. Always enigmatic. These are overused today as hyperbolic advertisement for things like cheese-puffs and belly-button rings. This book isn't like that at all.
Maybe I should tell the story about how I found this one.

Before the internet, before I got a second computer I used to keep lists. On paper with a pen lists of news topics. Alphabetized for later much easier access I would make my lists til there was no more room on the pag...more this is my third read of this in ten years. A rarity, that.
Timeless. Always enigmatic. These are overused today as hyperbolic advertisement for things like cheese-puffs and belly-button rings. This book isn't like that at all.
Maybe I should tell the story about how I found this one.

Before the internet, before I got a second computer I used to keep lists. On paper with a pen lists of news topics. Alphabetized for later much easier access I would make my lists til there was no more room on the page of so I had to make a new list leaving plenty of spaces between each entry so that over time each space could be full of new info and so on. Several books of those lists still exist and would be useful for the periods I did them in finding newsworthy topics as covered by the newyorktimes. Buggers make you pay for these articles now and all the ones I kept I believe are at the bottom of some trash heap somewhere, so the record-keeping, the newspaper keeping, all of it was a big waste of time. Except it taught me some very good 'stuff-management' skills that I shan't forget whenever I might go travelling in a far off distant country.
That being said, one of the things I kept in the lists were new book publications that would show up in the newyorktimes book review that comes out every week. I would read the section avidly every week and books or reviews I liked would get notated by author, title or sometimes subject or location, depending how zealous I was in keeping my lists that week. But this title and this author kept finding their way to the tops of my alphabetized lists. For like six months. So on one of the few expenditures for entertainment that year (sometimes that's just how it is) I basically chose this book at random from my lists.
Well it turned out to be a very different kind of book. It's a creepy religion conversion attempt set in a world full of shifters, 250 years ago. But most of the bulk of the book are stories told one after the other. People's histories as they remember them are spread out over successive days of wandering from site to site with a troupe of gypsy's. Most of the stories are told by the leader of this group, more or less. He shows himself to be a complete scoundrel, but everyone asks for him to continue his stories and as they branch off, as he introduces new characters in his narrative and supplies a bit of backstory for them, he launches off in a whole direction and these people and their relatives always end up leading to the plot shift of the last story which in turn the other characters will pick up on in their own way for their character's story. There's a supraterrestrial destined to walk the earth for aeons, there are a brother and sister pair of magi the one looking for the twin daughters of solomon and the sister looking for a way out, a mathematician, some other travellers, herders, priests, our Muslim heiresses and our protagonist. He gets lost in these mountains in the mid 1700's in a southern Spain that can still just quite remember her arab heritage and feels the battles between a dying, superstitious church and the winds of Romantic Rationalism. The wanderers are all depicted as individual types of free-thinker out in the no man's land of that day's borderland, in a time fraught with cracks all over in any supposed system of law or order. After a century of wars with England, Spain was mostly ruled by the French Bourbon line and was no longer (in the period of our story) such a great power. The book purports to be a translated copy of a work found in Spanish in a trunk in Spain. But the Saragossa described is not the actual Saragossa that's in Spain. This takes place far to the south in this wild overgrown region
But why would the author tell this kind of story? Jan Potocki was a Polish aristocrat living in the height of Euro- Napoleonic-mania and the years after where everything seemed to need a hero. Why indeed. It can be read as a kind-of romantic-gothic coming of age story, a Spanish set of Arabian Nights told in 66 days. The people in the stories aren't ever very heroic, but are often cruel. It seems there are several sets of revenge stories and dead people condemned to work out their frustrations on the living. All of them lost, all of them well aware of their ssurroundings just not what to do. Or if they know what to do the surroundings change and more is revealed and so things have changed. And then another story or new piece of info on this other story is revealed until you become lost in it and it no longer matters which story goes with which character or set of stories.
It seems to be an unfinished manuscript.
The author may have died several different ways.
He had several different careers, several different wives, and contested paternity estate suits after he died, but he died in debt.

You can read this book randomly, like the Aeneid used to be read in the Middle Ages.
"Just pick it up and read a little of it to me, dear. My eyesight's not so good, see, and I would just like to hear the sound of some of those beautiful words... yes, anywhere is fine. Just start anywhere."
(less)

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Wayne Thanks for a great review and that very absorbing personal tale, Ned.
Wayne, Sydney Australia.
Feb 10, 2009 07:18pm

Ned Wayne wrote: "Thanks for a great review and that very absorbing personal tale, Ned.
Wayne, Sydney Australia."

thanx!
But the story's not over.

The first t...more
Feb 11, 2009 12:23am

Wayne
Cripes, Ned, now you're telling me this book has a Life of its own!!! Well, would one expect or want anything less??!!It sounds such an original and b...more
Feb 12, 2009 04:48am

Apr 01, 2008 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is truly a strange and fun book. Written by a very eccentric Pole around the turn of the 19th century, it recounts a whole slew of frame tales set in 16th century Spain. It moves very quickly. At one point the narratives are nested 4 deep (a story within a story within a story within a story). It has Vampires and compulsive dueling, a wordless romance communicated exclusively through the making of colored inks, a calculus of morality and wisdom, and a vast conspiracy theory of European hist...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Tim Pendry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: cultural-studies, dark-fantasy, eighteenth-century, esoteric, heroic-fantasy, horror, literature-general, modern-european, nineteenth-century, sexuality-erotica

This is an overrated picaresque 'classic' from very early in the nineteenth century. It has its moments of genuine surprise and horror - indeed eroticism - but it is also overwrought, messy and confused.

Brian Stableford has produced a solid piece of academic background for this edition. We are really not very sure of the book's origin. Is it Polish or French and, if Polish, which Potocki wrote it?

There have been great cultural claims for this book - including claims of it holding secret qabbalis...more

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May 18, 2011 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Pure excellence. Traversing the intricate labyrinth of Potocki's masterpiece is a daunting challenge and will require periods rest during gestation, however the difficulty does not lie in the length of the work's passages, rather in the frequent addition of new voices, perspectives, places, dates (accurate and inaccurate) and relations that sometimes leave you wishing for a character map.

Alas, this book is greatly fulfilling -- every page of this work is guaranteed to produce amusement or provi...more

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Mar 27, 2010 Al Bità rated it 4 of 5 stars

Almost any description of this work is unjust: one is forced to tell only about some of the many elements it contains without really exhausting its complexity. And even that statement is misleading. I think, perhaps, the 'simplest' description is to call it a kind of literary snapshot of Spain set in the mid-18th century.

It achieves this by imposing a strict framework: 66 days of travelling, in which the 'main hero' (who becomes significantly less central to the work as it progresses) meets up w...more Almost any description of this work is unjust: one is forced to tell only about some of the many elements it contains without really exhausting its complexity. And even that statement is misleading. I think, perhaps, the 'simplest' description is to call it a kind of literary snapshot of Spain set in the mid-18th century.

It achieves this by imposing a strict framework: 66 days of travelling, in which the 'main hero' (who becomes significantly less central to the work as it progresses) meets up with an assorted group of people as he wanders through Spain. These people provide the main 'entertainment' — they tell stories of their lives, adventures, other histories, etc. Sometimes their stories contain other stories, and we even find that these stories contain other stories yet, all nesting within one another. Some stories are broken up and spread throughout the book, usually to allow for other stories to be told...

If all this sounds confusing, it is not in the reading. The strict format used provides break points; each story is told in the first person; and Ian Maclean's translation I found lucid and free-flowing. Ghosts, spirits (benign and evil) abound in the beginning, but that element later tends to dissipate. Among the characters we find a surprising cross-section of Christians, Jews and Muslims, all relatively tolerant of one another. We have stories of comedies of manners, insights into the social and political milieu of the narrators, religious tracts (especially the story of the Wandering Jew), mathematical and philosophical comments (cf. the amusingly presented Velasques) and, increasingly dominant as the work progresses, the very extensive 'story' of the Gypsy Chief.

All this might sound 'heavy', but believe me, it is not. There is humour throughout (some overt, some sly) and it is all surprisingly easy to read and enjoy.

Some might find the ending a bit of a let-down, but from another perspective, it is a logically and intellectually satisfying ending for a work which covers such a vast and complex landscape.(less)

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Nov 04, 2009 Bruno Gaspari rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2009, own, 1800s

O Manuscrito Encontrado em Saragosa é um livro que me impressiona a idade: foi escrito entre 1790 e 1805, mas a linguagem é perfeitamente moderna e simples. Satírico com as várias culturas que viviam na Europa no século XIX, a narrativa é conduzida por vários relatos de personagens sobre acontecimentos que podem ou não ter ligação com a história de Alphonse, o personagem principal, criando uma rede interessante de acontecimentos com um viés sobrenatural.

Esse é o único livro que possuo 2 edições...more

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Jul 18, 2008 Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars

Russian dolls in Chinese boxes. A proto-post-modern gothic picaresque satirical Bildungsroman featuring stories within stories within stories (within stories...), all of them immensely entertaining; populated with ghosts, bandits, succubi, Cabalists, Gypsies, crypto-Muslims, and the Spanish Inquisition (I'll bet you didn't expect them). Wild, weird, way ahead of its time.

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Jul 25, 2007 Dmitry rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Any fan of horror, adventure or sci-fi, Borges or Calvino.

Oh what a book this is. Two hundred years old, it could've been written yesterday. Imagine a "Canterbury Tales" or "Decameron" where the stories are a mix of supernatural horror and swashbuckling adventure, each satisfying on its own, but added together, telling an intricate hidden plot. Unprecedented and unsurpassed.

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Apr 27, 2012 Vincent rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

I hadn't heard of this book before I found a reference to it on Wikipedia. It is a version of 1,001 nights told in 65 days as described by a Walloon nobleman while traveling in Spain in the 1740's. It is full of intrigue, fantasy and crime. Taking the reader through southern Europe, it weaves the tales of 15 different storytellers in the background of the narrator. There are gypsies, Muslim conspirators, smugglers and duelist telling tales that verge on the supernatural, but still firmly grounde...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Ian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, historical, incomplete

Un romanzo di racconti a scatole cinesi, a metà tra le Mille e una notte e il Decamerone, in cui la vicenda del protagonista è solo il filo narratore tra le storie dei vari personaggi che incontra sul suo cammino, nelle quali a loro volta vengono narrate altre storie che si ricordano e si rincorrono sempre per ripetizione, tematiche e simbologia.

L'unica pecca è che Adelphi ha deciso di pubblicare la versione del 1805 che contiene solo 14 delle 66 giornate, più tre racconti di 'Avadoro, storia sp...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Lee Foust rated it 4 of 5 stars

Although I feel as though this review will almost immediately drift into minor criticisms--provoked by my living in the hectic 21st century versus the leisurely pace of an 18th century text as episodic, as long, as intricate, and as self-involved as __The Manuscript Found in Saragossa__, let me first say that this is a pretty fantastic book, both for its engrossing tales, but primarily for those very intricacies and formal narrative somersaults that I have seldom found in other texts of this typ...more Although I feel as though this review will almost immediately drift into minor criticisms--provoked by my living in the hectic 21st century versus the leisurely pace of an 18th century text as episodic, as long, as intricate, and as self-involved as __The Manuscript Found in Saragossa__, let me first say that this is a pretty fantastic book, both for its engrossing tales, but primarily for those very intricacies and formal narrative somersaults that I have seldom found in other texts of this type. So what type is it? Good question. The translator's introduction calls __Saragossa__ a "novel in frames," which is a term I had not heard before but one which I will surely use a lot in the coming months as I, too, am writing one right now--I had been having trouble describing it to people too so this novel (and its introduction) has been indeed a propitious read for me right now.

The novel-in-a-frame form, in this instance, entails a linear narrative--but a very thin, almost patina-like narrative--which digresses over and over again into tales told by characters who keep waking up under a gallows at a crossroads beneath the hanging corpses of a couple of thieves after nights of adventures or dreams, no one is quite sure which. There are even digressive tales within some of the tales. There are thieves, political intrigues, deaths and mystical journeys into hidden caverns and underground springs, lots of sexual threesomes, and one insanely shy maker of ink; in other words, a fantastic array of characters and adventures.

The inevitable comparisons are to be made to Boccaccio's __Decameron__ or __The 1,001 Nights__ but I actually found the flavor of Potocki's novel to be more reminiscent of Gerard de Nerval's pseudo-mystical reveries or the granddaddy of all romance-style (that is to say episodic) novels-in-frames, (and, as I have argued in essays elsewhere on this very web, all Gothic romances as well) Apuleius' __Metamorphoses__, better known to English-speaking readers as __The Golden Ass__. __Saragossa__, like Nerval's novels and semi-autobiographical extravaganzas, explores the mystical, the blurry edges of existence, and the cross-over borderlands between sleep and waking, familiarity and otherness, between Christianity and Islam (which makes Spain, for centuries at a time part of each religion, a perfect setting), sanity and madness, between self and other with a series of images and narratives about doubles, multiple love partners, and bands of outsiders. Reading such books is like taking a path into the woods that you know can only lead to your getting lost. It's usually worth it.

Well, look, I managed not to write any of the banal criticisms that had worried me while reading--and it's better that way.
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Jan 09, 2008 Sarah is currently reading it

Gypsies, criminals, stories within stories, automatons, ghosts, celestial visions, not-so-celestial visions, love, revenge, and a special guest appearance by the Wandering Jew- what's not to love?

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Nov 02, 2010 Patrick Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Jan Potocki's novel is a huge and sprawling one. He tells a story within a story within a story within a story, and so on. The novel is a frame-tale novel that takes place during the Napoleonic wars. A wandering knight of sorts, Alphonse van Worden, finds and reads a manuscript he finds in a dilapidated building in the Sierra Morena mountains of Spain. The narrator of the manuscript's stories (about 100 of them) overlap and hint at themes as varied as Qabbalah, witchcraft, the walking dead, and...more

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Oct 26, 2012 Velozeto rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Su autor, Jan Potocki, fue un escritor polaco bastante desconocido y de omnímoda cultura.

Mezcla espiritismo, aventuras, cábala. Fue precursora de la literatura fantástica posterior.

Lo mejor es cómo te mete en el ambiente esotérico, siniestro y solitario de un páramo de Sierra Morena, con sus ventas encantadas y sus personajes peculiares. Lo "peor" es la última parte, cuando el espiritismo pierde en favor de la aventura o la cábala (cuestión de gustos, claro).

En cualquier caso es un libro muy ext...more

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Oct 17, 2012 Sara rated it 3 of 5 stars

Este livro é uma "matrioska" de histórias.

A ideia de ler uma obra gótica, de aspectos sobrenaturais e eróticos escrita por um linguista etnógrafo aventureiro nos finais do século XVIII agradou-me muito.
E, de facto, o livro é muito interessante, ou não se passasse na nossa Península Ibérica, tão povoada de histórias, mitos e lendas deste cariz... Cansou-me um pouco, no entanto. Não só pela dimensão (2 volumes de 350 páginas) mas também por ser, constantemente, mais do mesmo. E há tantas históri...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Zach rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction, mystery, novel, spanish, french, polish

Definitely the most unique book I've ever read in terms of structure. Definitely still some loose ends that are still mentally untied for me. Definitely not sure how Potocki pulled off such a convoluted, intricate, story within a story within a story within a story within a story (to the 7th or 8th power at some points, I'm pretty sure). This book lacked a certain non-put-downable quality, and no great scenes pop out, but overall it was strangely compelling at the same time. This was probably du...more

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Nov 08, 2012 Psychophant rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: french-edition, historical-fiction, collected-shorts, reviewed

This was a hard read. The XIXth century French was easier than I expected, but the continuous repetition, the nested stories, the fact that most narrators are unreliable, together with the jumps between events and periods, make it difficult to track.

The book has a structure vaguely similar to The Thousand and One nights, with many narrators telling stories but more often telling stories about others. The stories range from Gothic horror (in the beginning) to picaresque, to some libertine tales,...more

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Dec 04, 2011 Bettie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: winter-20112012, doo-lally, napoleonic, translation, books-about-books-and-book-shops, polish-root, adventure, gothic

saragossa manuscript

1809
film only
translation
books about books
winter
napoleonic
polish root
gothic
adventure
translation

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)
Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (original title)

From IMDB - In the Napoleonic wars, an officer finds an old book that relates his grandfather's story, Alfons van Worden, captain in the Walloon guard. A man of honor and courage, he seeks the shortest route through the Sierra Morena. At an inn, the Venta Quemada, he sups with two Islamic princesses. The...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Artur Coelho rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Quem conta um conto acrescenta-lhe um ponto, diz-se. No caso deste livro a tendência é mais quem conta um conto acrescenta-lhe outro, numa sucessão fractal de narrativas dentro de narrativas tão entrelaçadas que a páginas tantas o escritor cria um personagem, geómetra distraído que reduz a sua percepção do mundo a convolutas elocubrações, que reclama com a confusão de tanta história dentro de histórias. Sendo geómetra, magica um algoritmo para se manter a par das histórias que se estendem, conta...more Quem conta um conto acrescenta-lhe um ponto, diz-se. No caso deste livro a tendência é mais quem conta um conto acrescenta-lhe outro, numa sucessão fractal de narrativas dentro de narrativas tão entrelaçadas que a páginas tantas o escritor cria um personagem, geómetra distraído que reduz a sua percepção do mundo a convolutas elocubrações, que reclama com a confusão de tanta história dentro de histórias. Sendo geómetra, magica um algoritmo para se manter a par das histórias que se estendem, contadas por personagens que recontam as aventuras de outros personagens numa sucessão imparável.

Um livro intrigante, que faz recordar as mil e uma noites ou os contos de canterbury, em que as histórias se sucedem de forma quase fractal acabando por regressar ao início, diria que circular mas atendendo ao espírito do livro aplicar-se-á melhor os ouroboros como qualificação. Tem um certo carácter iniciático e obscurantista. Já há um certo tempo que um livro não me absorvia tanto. Insere-se na tradição literária de viagens em que os longos caminhos são a oportunidade para os participantes partilharem histórias com os seus companheiros, similar a clássicos como Decameron ou Os Contos de Canterbury. Mas Potocki vai mais longe. A viagem em si também é uma história, périplo de intrigas e aventuras que envolvem um jovem soldado em peripécias de fantasia nos caminhos serranos da Andaluzia. Ao longo das peripécias cruza-se com outros personagens, cada um desfiando um conto pessoal que cujas personagens por si contam as suas histórias. Apesar da dispersão fractal, cheia de ramificações rizomáticas que levam a novas histórias, todas se concluem no seu início, o cumprimento do destino do jovem soldado, herdeiro de um segredo que atravessa os mundos católico e muçulmano.

Escrito ao longo de onze anos, toque que me recorda Joyce e a sua odisseia com Ulisses, por um nobre polaco viajante consumado pela Europa do século XVIII e apaixonado pelas espanhas, este romance surpreende pela complexa estrutura e assombrosa variedade de registos literários. Potocki oscila sem pestanejar entre romance de aventuras, conto moralista, histórias de assombrações, crítica de costumes, romance de paixões, delícias de erotismo poético, pensamentos filosóficos e uma curiosa proto-ficção científica onde se conjugam fantasias de viagens ao passado e autómatos. Manuscrito Encontrado em Saragoça é um daqueles raros livros dos quais se pode dizer que, efectivamente, encerra mundos dentro das suas páginas. (less)

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Nov 24, 2010 Morgan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantastical, polish, french

The copy I found at the Strand is not actually the full Manuscript--it's current to the 1950s/1960s when only a few portions had been found, instead of the full 60-some days in the life of Alphonse van Worden (in fact, the title's a prime example of a mistranslation that you find a lot in older translations, much like the difference in translations of The Stranger). My guess is that this was the edition used in the making of the movie, being contemporary, and that the rest of the tale was found...more

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Jul 13, 2010 Malgwyn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Saragossa not what it appears to be. There are deliberate misleadings; places are not where they are known to be. As a Novitiate of the Order of Malta, the politics of religious orders are known to the author, though he has sworn to keep them confidential. There is little doubt from the content that Potocki was involved in the more esoteric cultures of his time. He knows details of Ismaili Islam few Westerners of the time would have grasped, and no surprise he traveled extensively in the Ottoman...more

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Jul 26, 2008 Branduno rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: frame-stories, unsettling, reviewed

Mysterious, unsettling, and a great deal of fun, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a frame tale that contains as many styles of storytelling as it does characters. The confident but naive Alphonse Van Worden makes his way across the mountainous Spanish countryside, encountering seductive Moorish princesses, worldly nomad kings, monks, demoniacs, mystics, mathematicians, and the Spanish Inquisition, each of whom has a meandering and multi-layered tale to tell, and any of whom could be a vampir...more

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About Jan Potocki

Jan Potocki was born into the Potocki family, an aristocratic family, that owned vast estates in Poland. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the Polish Army as a captain of engineers, and spent some time on a galley as a novice Knight of Malta. He was probably a Freemason and had a strong interest in the occult.
Potocki's colorful life took him across Europe, Asia and North Afri...more Jan Potocki was born into the Potocki family, an aristocratic family, that owned vast estates in Poland. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the Polish Army as a captain of engineers, and spent some time on a galley as a novice Knight of Malta. He was probably a Freemason and had a strong interest in the occult.
Potocki's colorful life took him across Europe, Asia and North Africa, where he embroiled himself in political intrigues, flirted with secret societies, contributed to the birth of ethnology — he was one of the first to study the precursors of the Slavic peoples from a linguistic and historical standpoint.
In 1790 he became the first person in Poland to fly in a hot air balloon when he made an ascent over Warsaw with the aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard, an exploit that earned him great public acclaim. He also established in 1788 in Warsaw a publishing house named Drukarnia Wolna (Free Press) as well as the city's first free reading room.
Potocki's wealth enabled him to travel extensively about Europe, the Mediterranean and Asia, visiting Italy, Sicily, Malta, the Netherlands, Germany, France, England, Russia, Turkey, Spain, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and even Mongolia. He was also one of the first travel writers of the modern era, penning lively accounts of many of his journeys, during which he also undertook extensive historical, linguistic and ethnographic studies. As well as his many scholarly and travel writings, he also wrote a play, a series of sketches and a novel.
Potocki married twice and had five children. His first marriage ended in divorce, and both marriages were the subject of scandalous rumors. In 1812, disillusioned and in poor health, he retired to his estate at Uladowka in Podolia, suffering from "melancholia" (which today would probably be diagnosed as depression), and during the last few years of his life he completed his novel.
Potocki committed suicide in December 1815 at the age of 54, though the exact date is uncertain — possibly November 20, December 2 or December 11. There are also several versions of the circumstances of his death; the best-known story is that he shot himself in the head with a silver bullet — fashioned from the strawberry-shaped knob of a sugar bowl given to him by his mother — which he first had blessed by his castle priest. One version of Potocki's suicide suggests that he gradually filed the knob off the lid, a little every morning.
Potocki's most famous work is The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Originally written in French as Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, it is a frame tale which he wrote to entertain his wife. On account of its rich interlocking structure and telescoping story sequences, the novel has drawn comparisons to such celebrated works as the Decameron and the Arabian Nights.(less)

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