30/10/2025
'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa':
Regarding the edition: it's 632 pages in very tiny print. If it had larger print, this would probably have to be a two-volume.
The book itself works like an onion, in which you progressively have interpolated narrations inserted into other interpolated narrations. The main character, Alphonse, which serves as narrator, enters the world of the fantastic and the folklore in 18th-century Spain. The stories stem from the dawn of man to Alphonse's days, and the geography shows the entire Mediterranean. There's a lot of secret underground treasure caves and not a lot of sunlit palaces with tiles and fountains. Potocky inserted a lot of 1001 Nights and Arabian influences, with very little of Amazigh and other North African cultural influences - surprising for a story substantially set in the Southern Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. It's a touch of Orientalism gnawing at the author, as the book was published in 1805.
The concept is interesting and opens cool doors into the age of novels. Particularly interesting was the character Velaskez and his reflections about Good and Evil, Action and Intention, Ideas and Mankind. Potocky influxes the book with Philosophy, particularly from Ancient Greece and the three most preponderant Monotheisms. He was keen on literature that is now, to us, very much forgotten, and the footnotes are precious in that regard. I appreciate his interest in the mysteries of the world, which is the connective tissue between his onion-book.
To me, however, the most interesting part is the finale - the last 30 pages - as it is the disillusionment. The book is, in many ways, an updated blend of Don Quixote; (...)
