Labyrinthine Secrets & Marvels of the Venta Quemada
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Borne from the swirling currents of phantasmagoric orientalist conceits, masonic illuminism and the literary romantic gothicism of the 18th century Count Jan Potocki's 'The Manuscript Found at Saragossa' presents the reader with an undeniably beguiling feast of outre entertainments unfolding through the journey and adventures of our hapless hero, the young Walloon officer Alphonse Van Worden who stops at the haunted inn, the Venta Quemada, on his way to take up his military post at Madrid. With Alphonse we plunge into a weird and labyrinthine world of tales nested within tales like an eccentric Chinese puzzle, delectable stories of ghosts, courtesans, skeletons, hermits, brigands, inquisitors, noblemen, Moors, kabbalists, gypsies, smugglers and libertines. We trace the strange narratives and roles of such characters as the demoniac Pacheko, the exasperating yet strangely helpful Don Busqueros who torments the young lover Lope Suarez, the satanic figure of Don Belial with his mephistophelean discourses, the Knight of Toledo and many others for this book truly teems with wonders and mysteries, like a weird mirror or microcosm. And equally delightful is Potocki's symbolic sensibility as he weaves leitmotivs throughout the book, serpents, skulls, the two hanged men and the two beautiful Moorish sisters Emina and Zubeida who veritably haunt the narrator, implore him to convert to Islam and marry them both and give him a strange philtre to quaff from a cup of carven emerald that he may enjoy their charms in the dream-state - only to wake up kissing the rotting face of a cadaver beneath the gallows! Some scholars have suggested that Potocki deliberately wove symbols from the Tarot throughout this novel - along with a plethora of bizarre, ghostly, erotic and grotesque motifs and episodes. It's a book to immerse oneself in, to plunge into and travel with the protagonist through the demon-haunted landscapes of the Sierra Morena. There are many hints of esoteric and alchemical arcana, but analysis of such recondite elements need not interrupt the reader's sheer enjoyment of Potocki's marvellous and intricately constructed narratives within narratives. Such a tour-de-force, for all its inevitable unevenneses, is actually sustained pretty skilfully throughout and overall succeeds triumphantly, not least in that it transports the reader, as if he or she had indeed quaffed from Zubeida's emerald chalice, into the vivd and rich atmospheres of Old Spain in the 1700s, replete with romantic intrigues, courtly manners and picaresque adventures, shot through with encounters with unearthly and supernatural potencies. This review, in its brevity, can but give a mere glimpse of the delights of Jan Potocki's wondrous and labyrinthine novel which once discovered keeps drawing one back to savour its unusual pleasures and droll amusements. (The amazing 1965 Polish film, adaptation 'The Saragossa Manuscript', standing at 3 hours long , should also be mentioned here as a very creditable and highly enjoyable adaptation of the novel in the cinematic genre.) A literary classic of romantic gothicism and a high point of 19th century European literature.
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This book is French!
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A perfectly good translation but I bought it under the mistaken impression that Potocki had written in Polish. Wrong. Potocki is indeed a Polish writer, but he wrote this book in French. So if, like me, you are fluent in that musical tongue, by all means buy this fascinating book, in its original language, francais.
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200 year old gothic horror erotica
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'TMFAS' is a picaresque novel set in an apparently haunted Andalusian valley in the mid-eighteenth century. Alphonse van Worden, a captain of the Walloon guards, is travelling to Saragossa to take part in the siege there. His stay at a mysterious inn is interrupted by the appearance of two beautiful women who claim to be his cousins before seducing him. They promise to initiate him into the 'secret of the Gomelez', a Muslim family from which Alphonse is descended. However, when he awakes from his encounter he finds himself tucked between the corpses of two hanged criminals rather than his beautiful cousins. This sparks a series of encounters with gypsies, cabbalists, geometers, the Wandering Jew and a host of other characters, all with horrific and titillating stories to tell about the mysteries they have encountered in their lives. 'TMFAS' contains stories nested within stories nested within stories, all of which have some bearing on the 'secret of the Gomelez', directly or otherwise.
Although all the stories within 'TMFAS' are, to a greater or lesser degree, pertinent to the central story, there are so many of them, and they stray so far from the novel's starting point, that I found it hard to maintain interest for 700+ pages. Although the stories are short (much shorter than those in 'Don Quixote' for example), this actually makes it harder to get stuck in to, or even to remember who is who, as they chop and change between tellers. Also, as the starting point is left further behind, the 'secret of the Gomelez' becomes a distant memory, and the stories start to feel like a pointless parade of characters. At one point there is no reference to the central story for several hundred pages, and it made me lose interest.
'TMFAS' is the only book I have read that I could possibly describe as gothic horror erotica, and it was interesting to read it just because of that. However, it wasn't skilfully enough put together to justify 700 pages of wildly meandering storytelling, and lost me long before the end. One for the historically interested, not those looking for a pleasant read.
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Weird and Wonderful
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Imagine a book written by Edgar Allen Poe, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, filtered through the consciousness of Jorge Luis Borges, and you would have some inkling of what makes this extraordinary book so special. It is to literature what surrealism is to painting. Potocki, who on the strength of this book alone qualifies as Poland's greatest literary figure, prefigures the postmodern movement with his sleight-of-hand and multi-multi-layered text. A Freudian could spend years investigating the recesses and depths of Potocki's subconscious.
The framing device is a young nobleman's romantic wanderings through a section of Spain that could exist only in the mind of someone who was none too selective about his/her diet, or the kind of herbs they decided to ingest. A grotesque and lurid air suffuses this imaginative tale. The plot, if it could be called such a thing, unfolds like a chinese puzzle, one unreliable narrative nested within another. ...It wends its way into your thoughts like an ear-boring worm. It is the sort of work that Danielewski attempted, rather feebly by comparison, in his novel, House of Leaves. Potocki combines the supernatural with the erotic in a way that is unique in literature. Open the pages of this book and prepare to be disturbed and unsettled at times, but be prepared also to engage in a long, strange, diverting trip. By the way there is a CD of a movie version of Manuscript which was made in Europe in the 60s. Apparently it has been shown periodically in San Francisco art houses, and was appreciated by Jerry Garcia, among others. If the movie even approximates the book, I could understand why.
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A treasure!
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This book is a real gem! Interlaced stories, all very fascinating, with all the ingredients of good storytelling. The author was among other things a historian, so the book is set in a more or less correct historical context of the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. Add intriguing stories of love, struggle to get a place in society, and a fair bit of supernatural elements to the basic mix, and you get this book. Don't miss it!
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