Count Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa has somewhat of a cult following amongst fans of Gothic fiction. It consists of a collection of supernatural tales linked together by a complex series of frame stories, as in a nightmarish hall of mirrors. It has been called a "black Decameron". This is a really apt description, considering that practically all Gothic tropes are represented in the convoluted text: from ghosts to vampires, secret societies to violent bandits, underground passages to haunted castles. A bonus for Melitensia enthusiasts – one of the stories features a Knight of Malta who murders a rival in Strait Street, Valletta just up the road from where I earn my daily bread (in decidedly more mundane environs). ( )

There's a moment, about a halfway through, in which the recursive flashbacks interacted to reveal the narrator's own faulty perceptions that I thought this might be the most brilliant book ever written.

The difficulty, though, is that the narratives only overlap for short periods, and nothing ever ties together as tightly as is promised. As with Maturin's [b:Melmoth the Wanderer|207313|Melmoth the Wanderer|Charles Maturin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373051517l/207313._SY75_.jpg|200656], I'm not 100% certain if the reader ever even gets cleanly back to the framing device. It feels as though at some point the frames within frames within frames became lost enough that one could never make it all the way home.

I like that Maturin book more than I like this one, which might be a prose issue, or might be because I found Maturin's British version of Christian and Hebrew mythologies and fairytales more interesting than the Spanish ones featured here. I'm still glad I read both, but I'm not sure who I'd push Zaragosa on.

Warning about the Amazon Kindle version: it was scanned (and perhaps translated?) by computer with no human interaction. Paragraphs repeat several times, and sex-based pronouns (him, his, her, hers) switch randomly enough to cause confusion. ( )

While it is nicely written, it just feels like a lot of short stories that are just too short.
Stopped after 153 pages ( )

Teszek egy bátortalan és eleve kudarcra ítélt kísérletet arra, hogy ennek a könyvnek a tartalmát összefoglaljam. Szóval. Van ez a fiatal elbeszélő, aki valamikor a XVIII. század derekán elindul Madridba, hogy csatlakozzon a vallon ezredhez. Rohadt bátor srácról beszélünk, annyira bátor, hogy a Sierra Morenán keresztül akar Madridba menni, holott köztudott, hogy a Sierra Morena tele van szellemekkel, démonokkal meg vámpírokkal, de úgy tele van, hogy ha feldobsz egy krumplit (miért pont krumplit?), akkor óhatatlanul egy szellemet, démont vagy vámpírt találsz el, amin az nyilván megsértődik. Szóval ne dobálj krumplit. Rögtön találkozik is két akasztott emberrel (aminek később jelentősége lesz), aztán összefut két csodaszép leányzóval, akik távoli rokonai, és nagyon akarnak ám valamit a fiatalembertől, de olyasvalamit, hogy annak a puszta gondolatától elpirulok, pedig láttam én már karón varnyút. Tekintve azonban, hogy két lánnyal az ember egyszerre csak abban az esetben egyesülhet a házasság szent kötelékében, ha muzulmán, ezért a hölgyemények elkezdik kapacitálni hősünket, hogy vegye fel az iszlám hitet. (Nehéz nyomósabb érvet elképzelni az iszlám hit mellett, mondhatnánk erre, de nem mondjuk, mert nem vagyunk mi olyanok.) A fiatalember nem áll kötélnek, ugyanakkor kiderül, hogy a házasság szent köteléke nélkül is lehet ám egyesülni (minő felfedezés!), ám ennek nem várt következménye van: hősünk ugyanis a… khm… tevékenység után arra ébred, hogy a két akasztott ember bitófája alatt fekszik. (Ugye mondtam, hogy jelentősége lesz?) Mivel többször is megismétli a kellemdús kísérletet, ugyanazzal az eredménnyel, arra a következtetésre jut, hogy lehet, a lányok kísértő démonok. Bár jobb volna, ha nem azok lennének, mert hősünk szívesen kísérletezne tovább velük - szóval bizakodik. Miközben bizakodik, azért halad is valamerre, és útja során találkozik cigányvajdákkal, kabalistákkal, tudósokkal és nemesekkel, sőt, magával a bolygó zsidóval is, akikkel hosszas beszélgetésekbe elegyedik, miközben a Sierra Morena rejtélyes, nagy hatalmú ura, Gomeléz sejk a háttérben sandán a szakállába mosolyog. Vajon min mosolyog a sejk? És mi van a két unokahúgocskával? Démonok vagy nem démonok? Nem mindegy ám az, mert ha démonok, akkor buktuk a templomi esküvőt. Mondjuk ha csak muzulmánok, akkor is.

Valahogy így. Az van ugyanis, hogy Potocki egyszerűen röhögve dobja sutba az átlátható cselekményszövést. A regény legszembetűnőbb strukturális jellemzője, hogy (hasonlatosan az Ezeregyéjszakához) törzsszövegének minimum háromnegyede mesékből áll. Ezt úgy kell elképzelni, hogy hősünk megy, mendegél, és találkozik X. lovaggal. X. lovag elkezdi mesélni saját élettörténetét. Aztán másnap jön Y., a remete, és ő is elkezdi mesélni az élettörténetét. Csakhogy beesteledik, menni kell a szereplőknek hajcsikálni, a mese félbeszakad. Másnap aztán Y. folytatja. De lehet, hogy X. Akármelyikük is folytatja, egyszer csak azon kapja magát az olvasó, hogy X. a saját történetében találkozik Z.-vel, aki szintén elkezd a mesén belül mesélni, Y. pedig a saját meséjében W.-vel fut össze, aki szintúgy mesébe kezd, és azt sem zárhatjuk ki, hogy W. a mesében elhelyezett meséjében még összefut valakivel, akinek szintén mesélhetnékje van. Hát így. Nem csoda, hogy még a szereplők se mindig értik, éppen melyik történetbe csatlakoztak be, pláne, hogy ezen történetek szereplői egy idő után elkezdenek átjárni a párhuzamos mesékbe, olyan kiborító katyvaszt eredményezve, hogy attól az embernek füle-farka kettéáll. Egy biztos: soha nem éreztem még jobban szükségét, hogy valami hálózati ábra-szerűséget szerkesszek a szöveg mellé, hátha akkor tudni fogom, ki kivel van.

És mégis, az elviselhetetlenség határát súroló fragmentáltság ellenére nem tudtam magam kivonni a szöveg bája alól. Potocki a laikusok nagy fene bátorságával egyszerre használ fel kihalásra ítélt irodalmi formákat (vegyük észre: megírásának ideje nem sokkal előzi meg a Vörös és feketét, vagy épp Hugo regényeit), ugyanakkor bizonyos aspektusaiban (különösen a termékeny káosz használatában) megdöbbentően modern. Látványosan törekszik valamiféle univerzalitásra – egyszerre akar tudományról, vallásról, mágiáról és kísértetekről regélni, ezotériát és matematikát és történelmet igyekszik egy porondra ereszteni, aztán lássuk, mi jön ki az egészből. Ha sikerül az olvasónak eleresztenie elvárásait arról, hogyan is kéne kinéznie egy „rendes” regénynek, nagy élvezetet talál majd ebben a szövegben. ( )

Opening the Goodreads app the other day I was served this quotation from Jonathan Safran Foer: "my life story is the story of everyone I've ever met." I think that's about as good an encapsulation of this unruly, beguiling novel as you could wish for. Everyone's story is everyone else's story; everything is linked; identity is defined in relation to others, if not exclusively by others. If this sounds confusing, it is. Velasquez, the eccentric geometer, surely speaks for every reader of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa when he complains "I have tried in vain to concentrate all my attention on the Gypsy Chief's words but I am unable to discover any coherence whatsoever in them. I do not know who is speaking and who is listening." I've read the book three times now, and the incoherence is only very slightly less.

But as Pynchon said, "why should things be easy to understand?" I love this novel because, like Pynchon's novels, it takes the world's incomprehensible profusion head-on and doesn't try to make a morsel of it. Other frame stories like the Thousand and One Nights and the Canterbury Tales use their frames like picture frames, as containers for art, or, like Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, as literary devices to situate the story in relation to the reader. But Manuscript is different: the frame is an integral part of the art; or rather, the art and the frame are one and the same. The principal raconteur of this frame-story par excellence, and the closest thing it has to a focal point, is the protean Pandesowna aka Avadoro aka the Gypsy Chief ("in changing my name I had also changed my outward appearance"). As a child he almost drowns in a cauldron of ink: pace Obelix and Achilles, the perfect superhero origin story for a super-fabulist. And as a self-designated "gypsy", he's compelled to wander, to defer conclusion, like his own wandering narratives and, of course, the Wandering Jew who tags along intermittently with our merry, motley crew.

"My life story". Life is a story, and its characters are as real as we are. But how real are we? Except for a couple of stand-alone tales near the beginning, from a book in Alphonse's father's library (and somehow like an orchestra tuning up), every story here is the story of a life, told by a character in someone else's story. Characters from one person's story show up in another's reality, because that reality is itself a story. No story exists in isolation. Manuscript emphasies stories as things that are told — it's always relevant who's telling the story; every tale is a performance. Which means there's no doctrinal form, that they might vary in a retelling, to a different audience, in a different place. "Perhaps" says the Gypsy Chief when Alphonse points out that a story he (the Chief) once heard closely resembles one Alphonse read in a book, "Romati took his story from that book. He may have made it up. But what is certain is [...] it's not important whether a story is true or not."

The nesting is obsessive, demented, dizzyingly deep. But it's the only way: stories need to work backwards in time, because a conventional forward-moving narrative doesn't really explain why things are happening. It's the unanswerable why of the annoying brat, but if its reiteration is confounding, that's because things are confounding. The perceptive Velasquez again: "all the gypsy's stories begin in a simple enough way and you think you can already predict the end. But things turn out quite differently." Or as his crush, the witty Rebecca, says, "continual surprises don't keep one's interest in the story alive. One can never foresee what will happen subsequently." In other words, one has to go back. All stories are retrospective, branching, inconclusive. The book is full of subterranean scenes, and reading Manuscript, pushing through the nested narratives, is like tunnelling (some might say boring) down through layers of reality in search of some elusive foundation or point of origin.

The book is full of seductions, physical and spiritual, and one of its motifs is the tension between the absurd code of honour Alphonse inherits from his father and the temptations of his Moorish (and very moreish) cousins Emina and Zubeida. But as they wander the enchanted landscape of the Sierra Morena, all the "first level" characters are seduced by stories, frustrated, like Shahriyar in the Arabian Nights, by the nightly deferrals. Rebecca's rather stuck-up brother Uzeda expresses the plenipotent nature of narrative when he explains the Kabbalah: "words strike the air and the mind, they act on the senses and on the soul [...] they are the true intermediaries between matter and every order of intelligence." Hervas the obsessional scholar dedicates the very first volume of his 100-vol. universal encyclopedia to grammar. It's as though stories are an intoxicating, seducing compound from which the characters are trying to extract the active ingredient — but like bees around some stupefying flower, or Pandesowna with the tintero largo, end up losing themselves in their obsession.

Many kinds of obsession are on display, to the extent that Manuscript becomes a kind of democracy of the deranged. Alphonse's duel-obsessed dad; the crazed polymath Hervas; the Kabbalist siblings raised by an equally unhinged father; Pacheco the demoniac whose three speeches are bracketed by, in order, a terrible cry, a ghastly howl, a terrible cry, a ghastly howl, a long wail, and a terrible howl; Pandesowna's ink-addled progenitor (fathers seem to be another theme...) But all these lunatics (even the quidnunc Busqueros, as close to a villain as the book contains) are sympathetic to some degree, perhaps because their craziness is a reaction to a crazy world of conspiracies and ramified connections. It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you — and the Inquisition really was out to get you. Persecution induces dissembling, secret societies, "occult" (in the sense of hidden as well as woo) activity, fiction in general — story as distraction or deception. Manuscript also tracks the revolutionary spore that was in the air of its 18th century setting, and had bloodily fruited in America and France by the time of the novel's publication. The nobility among whom most of the stories are set is deeply incestuous (perhaps even more so than the narrative with its overlapping plots), as if turning in on itself in anticipation of the coming social changes. So they're another kind of secret society. Not to mention Potocki's own rumoured incest (Potocki's life is arguably the real frame for the Manuscript).

All this blather, though, risks obscuring what I love most about this shaggiest of dog stories: its zest for life, for the experience of being in the world. It's just such a big beating heart of a book. Alphonse sums it up to himself one morning:

I was awoken just after dawn by the chirping of the cicadas, which is particularly lively and cheerful in Andalusia. I had become sensitive to the beauties of nature. I left my tent to see the effect of the first rays of sun on the vast horizon. My thoughts turned to Rebecca. 'She is right,' I said to myself, 'to prefer the concrete joys of this mortal life to idle speculation about an ideal world to which we shall all sooner or later belong. Does not this world offer us physical sensations and pleasurable impressions in enough variety to occupy us during the time of our short life?'

This gentle mockery of Enlightenment rationalism and concomittant pleasure in the physical world pops up again and again. Sometimes it's the recusant Rebecca, freed from the tedious abstractions of the Kabbalah, poking fun at the various monomaniacs around her, like Alphonse's dad ("if your father hadn't duelled with eleven officers a quarrel might well have arisen. This he did very well to avoid"); or there are Potocki's frequent digs at Velasquez's naive scientism, like the scene where the combined charms of Antonia and Marita fail to penetrate his primes and logarithms. Scholastics, says Hervas, is "the art of conducting a proof completely independently of common sense." As for the Church, it's even more useless at explaining things, figuring as a morbid instrument of chastisement, sunderer of lovers, and general fun-sponge (from Romati's story: "I am so far from superstition and credulity that theology is perhaps the only branch of knowledge that I have consistently neglected"). Understanding comes, if it comes at all, through companionship, shared experience, shared wanderings, and stories that stave off dreariness and maybe, as for Scheherazade, death. Maybe, after all the stories, we're no wiser than when we started (despite Potocki's bow-tied conclusion), but that's absolutely okay with me. Maybe by my tenth read-through I'll even figure out what the hell is going on. ( )