the manuscript found in saragossa (jan potocki, tr. ian maclean)

This is one of those books which when you encounter a fellow reader of it, there will be an exchange of knowing nods based on the notion that you have both participated in a unique literary experience. There are other books which have something in common with Potocki’s text, (The Decameron, Quixote, 1001 Nights), but they will be few and far between.

Saragossa is an accumulation of stories, banked up on top of each other. Ostensibly the tale of a Walloon officer who finds himself stranded in a Spanish mountain range, it spirals out like a cobweb as every character he meets has their story to tell. These in turn contains stories within stories. Structurally, the book is a rubik’s cube, with characters from one strand popping up in another strand and the narrative becoming so dense that even the characters themselves start to complain about the impossibility of following everything.

However, just as radical as the book’s structure is its content. The characters the protagonist, Alphonse van Worden, meets, are as multicultural a collection as anything one might hope to meet in contemporary Spain. Some of the mountain bandits are Muslims, who have hidden out for centuries, since the Moors were defeated in the fifteenth century. Others are Jewish. Others still are visitors from the New World, returning from Latin America. The scope of the novel stretches from North Africa to Mexico. The breadth of the its religious scope is equally broad, with the novel describing Islamic, Jewish, Christian and Gnostic thought. Somewhere in the heart of the caves that stretch into the mountains are secrets which the writer might know but will never dare to utter. As such, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa might be the broadest church book ever written: I can think of no other text that engages with such a cultural multitude.

This itself feels astonishing, as is the whole book. The masterly aspect of the writing comes from the way it flirts with tedium, as we embark on yet another narrative, but somehow succeeds in converting every strand into something unique and engaging. It is, without doubt, one of the more remarkable novels I have ever had the privilege of reading.