I’ve recently finished Jan Potocki’s “The Manuscript Found in Saragossa”, a fantastical novel written between 1800 and 1815 that consists of a series of stories within stories told over a period of sixty-six days in the manner of Arabian Nights or The Decameron.
The principal narrator, Alphonse van Worden, is the son of a man so pathologically obsessed with the finer points of honour manifested in the “tribunal of blood” that he thinks nothing of fighting a dozen duels in a day and punctiliously records the history of each in his notebook. His mother takes aristocratic traits to a similarly absurd degree. Having decided that the French are beneath her, she endures her stay in Paris by maintaining an absolute disdain: “She made it a rule not only not to learn French but also never to listen to it when it was spoken.”
Abandoned by his valet and mulateer while traversing the mountain range of Sierra Morena, a land rumoured to be inhabited by smugglers, bandits, murderous gypsies and terrifying ghosts, Alphonse finds himself bewitched by a pair of beautiful women who may be his cousins or may be succubi whose mysterious appearances and disappearances are woven into a narrative composed of encounters with a wide range of characters united in their love of story telling.
Stories interrupt stories in Tristram Shandy-esque digressions as each narrative introduces further characters who in turn narrate their own tales, the stories recursing back in on themselves until narratives are four or five levels deep and the listeners at the outer level announce themselves as confused as the reader would be in danger of becoming had Potocki not exercised considerable skill in managing the various threads.
The book’s end is slightly disappointing, perhaps inevitably since the beauty of the book lies in the digressions not in the forward impulse of the underlying plot, but the charm and humour of the stories carries the day.