The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Penguin Classics) [Kindle Edition]

Imagine a book written by Edgar Allen Poe, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, filtered through the consciousness of Jorge Luis Borges, and you would have some inkling of what makes this extraordinary book so special. It is to literature what surrealism is to painting. Potocki, who on the strength of this book alone qualifies as Poland's greatest literary figure, prefigures the postmodern movement with his sleight-of-hand and multi-multi-layered text. A Freudian could spend years investigating the recesses and depths of Potocki's subconscious.
The framing device is a young nobleman's romantic wanderings through a section of Spain that could exist only in the mind of someone who was none too selective about his/her diet, or the kind of herbs they decided to ingest. A grotesque and lurid air suffuses this imaginative tale. The plot, if it could be called such a thing, unfolds like a chinese puzzle, one unreliable narrative nested within another. ...It wends its way into your thoughts like an ear-boring worm. It is the sort of work that Danielewski attempted, rather feebly by comparison, in his novel, House of Leaves. Potocki combines the supernatural with the erotic in a way that is unique in literature. Open the pages of this book and prepare to be disturbed and unsettled at times, but be prepared also to engage in a long, strange, diverting trip.

By the way there is a CD of a movie version of Manuscript which was made in Europe in the 60s. Apparently it has been shown periodically in San Francisco art houses, and was appreciated by Jerry Garcia, among others. If the movie even approximates the book, I could understand why.

Borne from the swirling currents of phantasmagoric orientalist conceits, masonic illuminism and the literary romantic gothicism of the 18th century Count Jan Potocki's 'The Manuscript Found at Saragossa' presents the reader with an undeniably beguiling feast of outre entertainments unfolding through the journey and adventures of our hapless hero, the young Walloon officer Alphonse Van Worden who stops at the haunted inn, the Venta Quemada, on his way to take up his military post at Madrid. With Alphonse we plunge into a weird and labyrinthine world of tales nested within tales like an eccentric Chinese puzzle, delectable stories of ghosts, courtesans, skeletons, hermits, brigands, inquisitors, noblemen, Moors, kabbalists, gypsies, smugglers and libertines. We trace the strange narratives and roles of such characters as the demoniac Pacheko, the exasperating yet strangely helpful Don Busqueros who torments the young lover Lope Suarez, the satanic figure of Don Belial with his mephistophelean discourses, the Knight of Toledo and many others for this book truly teems with wonders and mysteries, like a weird mirror or microcosm. And equally delightful is Potocki's symbolic sensibility as he weaves leitmotivs throughout the book, serpents, skulls, the two hanged men and the two beautiful Moorish sisters Emina and Zubeida who veritably haunt the narrator, implore him to convert to Islam and marry them both and give him a strange philtre to quaff from a cup of carven emerald that he may enjoy their charms in the dream-state - only to wake up kissing the rotting face of a cadaver beneath the gallows! Some scholars have suggested that Potocki deliberately wove symbols from the Tarot throughout this novel - along with a plethora of bizarre, ghostly, erotic and grotesque motifs and episodes. It's a book to immerse oneself in, to plunge into and travel with the protagonist through the demon-haunted landscapes of the Sierra Morena. There are many hints of esoteric and alchemical arcana, but analysis of such recondite elements need not interrupt the reader's sheer enjoyment of Potocki's marvellous and intricately constructed narratives within narratives. Such a tour-de-force, for all its inevitable unevenneses, is actually sustained pretty skilfully throughout and overall succeeds triumphantly, not least in that it transports the reader, as if he or she had indeed quaffed from Zubeida's emerald chalice, into the vivd and rich atmospheres of Old Spain in the 1700s, replete with romantic intrigues, courtly manners and picaresque adventures, shot through with encounters with unearthly and supernatural potencies. This review, in its brevity, can but give a mere glimpse of the delights of Jan Potocki's wondrous and labyrinthine novel which once discovered keeps drawing one back to savour its unusual pleasures and droll amusements. A literary classic of romantic gothicism and a high point of 19th century European literature.

This book is a real gem! Interlaced stories, all very fascinating, with all the ingredients of good storytelling. The author was among other things a historian, so the book is set in a more or less correct historical context of the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. Add intriguing stories of love, struggle to get a place in society, and a fair bit of supernatural elements to the basic mix, and you get this book. Don't miss it!