![The Absolute Book: 'An INSTANT CLASSIC, to rank [with] masterpieces of fantasy such as HIS DARK MATERIALS or JONATHAN STRANGE](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91aREvTX7iL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
I had never heard of Jan Potocki until a few months ago when I read an article about Penguin Classics in the Guardian’s Saturday Review. The author of the article recommended what seemed to be a random selection of ten novels, among which was this one. When I looked for it on Amazon it was clear that other Guardian readers had been searching for it and the other nine recommendations.
Jan Potocki was an Enlightenment polymath: a traveller, a scholar, a political activist. Like Ernest Hemingway, he packed a lot of living into his life and then took his own life with a bullet – in Potocki’s case, a silver bullet fashioned from his teapot or sugar bowl, depending on which version of his demise you follow. According to the blurb in this edition, the bullet was blessed by Potocki’s chaplain, though that didn’t reduce its effectiveness.
An awful lot of Potocki’s erudition is packed into this novel, along with an enormous amount of imagination and entertainment. We’re asked to believe that there really was a manuscript found in Saragossa, composed by a young army officer who spent sixty-six days listening to a complex web of tales in some remote mountains in Andalusia. Unlike the Canterbury Tales where each pilgrim tells a discrete tale, in this book we have tales within tales within tales. There is a theme and there is a kind of unity to them that only becomes apparent at the end. There’s a lot of disguise, deception and subterfuge. A lot of characters are not what they seem – are they spirits, demons or just con artists?
The tales are mainly set in Europe in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth centuries, and occasionally they rub shoulders with real history and events, such as the War of the Spanish Succession. Another set of tales, delivered by a figure claiming to be the Wandering Jew, are set in the first century. The flavour of many of the tales is reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas: lords and ladies and duels and honour, but of course this novel was written long before Dumas. The added ingredient is the supernatural, which creeps into many of the tales.
There’s also a particularly nasty character called Busqueros, who keeps popping up as a spy, conman and general busybody. He describes how as a child he would hang out in people’s attics observing their doings and then run off and tell his mother all about it. As a young man he persuaded a bunch of other young men to wander around town with him in the middle of the night, armed with a ladder. Whenever he spotted an open window, they would keep watch while he shinned up the ladder to find out what was going on inside. Later he becomes a professional spy: “I saw a man whose gait – now crawling, now scuttling – reminded me of Don Busqueros. I had him watched and was told that he wore a false nose and was known as Dr Robusti. I didn’t doubt an instant that it was Busqueros, and that the wretch had slipped into the town with the intention of spying on us.”
You have to pay attention and carry a lot in your head as you connect one tale to another and follow various characters and their offspring through a maze of incidents and adventures. It’s worth it in the end. The device of having most of the tales told by a gypsy chieftain who is often interrupted to attend to the affairs of his band works well. The tales are presented in bite-size chunks that give you frequent opportunities to take a breather and reflect on what’s happening, pour yourself a glass of something even, before you plunge in again.
This is one of those books that really would be worth reading twice – or more – and each time you would find something new.
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![The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Penguin Classics) by [Jan Potocki, Ian MacLean]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51HAIYAyaJL._SY346_.jpg)
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