≡ Descargar Gratis The Manuscript Found in Saragossa Jan Potocki Ian Maclean 9780140445800 Books

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa Jan Potocki Ian Maclean 9780140445800 Books

Download As PDF : The Manuscript Found in Saragossa Jan Potocki Ian Maclean 9780140445800 Books

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa Jan Potocki Ian Maclean 9780140445800 Books

I read a review of this book years ago in the New York Review of Books. I was so intrigued by the favorable review that I bought the book. It starts out great with an interesting Don Quixote-like character, who is on a journey. As he meets other characters, they tell him stories, and the book quickly becomes a frame story: a story told within a story. But then characters within the interior frame story begin telling stories and by page 150 you are reading a story told by a character who is a character in another story being told by another character within another story within another story. Meanwhile, between these stories and sometimes even in the middle of them, the action retreats back to one of the other characters in one of the other stories. I can't recall specifically, but I think five levels deep into this obsessively framed story before I finally gave up. I tried couple years later to read it again, but I got buried again. Still, I gave it one more try, same result. I am a tenacious reader (have read Under the Volcano and Naked Lunch each a couple times through) yet this book defeated me. Still, I like it. It also has an interesting history, supposedly a "found" manuscript, but that may be an apocryphal claim by the writer or publisher to make it more mysterious. I may give it a fourth try in my retirement.


Tags : The Manuscript Found in Saragossa [Jan Potocki, Ian Maclean] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b>A literary masterpiece by a Polish traveller, aristocratic adventurer, political activist, ethnographer and publisher </b> Alphonse,Jan Potocki, Ian Maclean,The Manuscript Found in Saragossa,Penguin Classics,0140445803,Literary,Diaries,Psychological fiction,Spain - Social life and customs - 18th century,16th to 18th century fiction,Classic fiction,Classic fiction (pre c 1945),Classics,FICTION Classics,FICTION Historical General,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction-Literary,GENERAL,Great BritainBritish Isles,Literature - Classics Criticism,Literature: Texts,POLISH NOVEL AND SHORT STORY,ScholarlyUndergraduate,classic;historical;literary fiction;classic literature;classic books;alternate history;historical fiction books;classic novels;historical fiction novels;historical fiction;classics;fiction;novels;fiction books;historical novels;literature;books fiction;classics books;realistic fiction books;books historical fiction;classic fiction;gothic;victorian;england;horror;fantasy;english literature;adventure;mystery;drama;romance;school;short stories;science fiction;satire;medieval;american literature,gothic; french literature; historical fiction; adventure; historical; drama; literary fiction; victorian; school; classic literature; english literature; mythology; medieval; classic books; fiction; classics; fiction books; literature; historical fiction books; historical fiction novels; classic; french; german; german literature; mystery; england; middle ages; epic; saga; alternate history; classic fiction; novels; historical novels; classic novels; realistic fiction books; classics books; books fiction; books historical fiction,FICTION Historical General,FICTION Literary,Literature - Classics Criticism,Polish Novel And Short Story,Fiction,Literature: Classics,16th to 18th century fiction,Classic fiction,Classic fiction (pre c 1945),Literature: Texts

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa Jan Potocki Ian Maclean 9780140445800 Books Reviews

I have been using the edition of this book to do the research for my blog,"Looking for the Manuscript Found in Saragossa," about Polish Count Jan Potocki and his spectacularly strange novel. The edition is totally solid, and being able to search on specific terms to find my way to certain stories in the 650+ page text has been essential. I especially appreciate the active links in the table of contents and in the "A Guide to the Stories" section in the front matter, which makes it so easy to jump to favorite parts (like the funny bits about Velasquez the Geometer). Now if only I could find a Potocki biography written in English ....
The book is a collection of intertwining, often hilarious, stories of various natures, styles, and character gothic, romance, a singular mathmatician, erotica, chivalry, adventure, greed, religion from many perspectives. It seems that this novel deserves to be more popular, it fits the modern attention span with its substratum of vignettes, and the larger grand story that encompasses them, a timeless tale. The book is funny and the message profound, but of the bewildering conundrum sort that some great poems often leave one with, as the story intertwines the symbols of various lives into something that was mature and introspective but uplifting and cathartic -- it doesn't rely on words but on situations to do this; so probably losses little in translation as many poems do. If anything it leaves one with stronger sense of brotherhood and love for one's neighbor. Definitely fits with modern multiculturalism, or what it should be anyway, and I guess the author was also a Freemason; a strange bag of humanism. I will never forget some of the images, Potocki had quite an imagination.

There are also a lot of parallels with Parzival (the Grail Story) of the farcical sort. The man who can neither stand, nor sit, nor lie (A symbolic castrated Christian in the Grail); the apostasy of one's religion for the sake of a beautiful girl(s) (in Parzival the Muslim gives up his religion without a second thought); mindful, mocking anchorites (in the Grail he scolds Parzival for blowing his chance); the lone search verse the social search.

How does one end a book like this? I think the question is was it really meant to end?

I recommend reading this perhaps first, as Manuscript parradies it a bit Parzival (Penguin Classics)
Second Read 2017-
On the second read I saw a lot of parallels to Cabalism - well it is directly a significant part of the book. The number 66 is significant to cabalism - the number of chapters in the book. Cabalism does more to cure the possessed man than the Catholic Hermit. Although Rebecca ends up giving up her Cabalistic studies and gets more interested in the mathematician, who possibly represents rationalism - although the author seems to say that a study of rationalism leads to a sort of insanity in itself - if not a lucky one and more morally pure by accident. Cabalism sees Christianity and Islam as misguided Cabalism anyway; but both lack the purity and meaning of the originator - which is Cabalism. Another interesting theme in the book is the loss of the oral tradition and the the loss of people socialising more together possibly due to the effect of books on society. Just like Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" warns of the negative effects of screens/tv/and technology on social life Potocki may be, if not warning, lamenting the loss of social interaction due to all the reading and ink all over our lives, given the book was written about 200 years ago at the height of the novel. With Jerry Garcia, Pushkin, and Salman Rushdie all endorsing the book you can't go wrong in saying this book is going to be interesting and hit on many levels. It may be interesting to look further at the connection with cabalism and numbers represented in the book, or maybe not. Doesn't matter, the book is a good read without going deep into it. Have fun!
This book takes time to grow on one. After the first two hundred pages, the reader may well ask himself, as I did, whether the gain's really worth the candle in following these seemingly bizarre, unconnected tales. It is. The stories don't seem all that bizarre at all as one reaches the end, simply because of the fact that if you keep a sympathetic ear open toward the various tales, tellers of tales and characters within the tales, you will come to sympathise with each one. And herein lies the significance of this book It is a mirror in which the reader may view all these disparate aspects of what s/he calls "self".

The reader will, by turns, find himself sympathising with Jews, Christians, Muslims, Chaldeans, pagans of various sorts, absent-minded mathematicians, mystic adepts of the cabbala and on and on. These, very contradictory, ways of perceiving the world eventually come to strike chords in the reader through his or her sympathy with the tale or the teller. Perhaps the primary reason for this looking glass effect is the eroticism never very far from the surface in almost every tale, an eroticism to which every reader, every human being, can relate.

Having finished this lovely, meandering book, I am left pondering, as after finishing every great work of literature, the nature of self and the power of words. As the cabbalist puts it early on in the going here

"Words strike the air and mind, they act on the senses and on the soul. Although you are not initiates, you can easily grasp that they are the true intermediaries between matter and every order of intelligence." P.102

This book, as do all works of literature, does indeed act as a "true intermediary" between our changing sense of self and the changing world we inhabit.
I read a review of this book years ago in the New York Review of Books. I was so intrigued by the favorable review that I bought the book. It starts out great with an interesting Don Quixote-like character, who is on a journey. As he meets other characters, they tell him stories, and the book quickly becomes a frame story a story told within a story. But then characters within the interior frame story begin telling stories and by page 150 you are reading a story told by a character who is a character in another story being told by another character within another story within another story. Meanwhile, between these stories and sometimes even in the middle of them, the action retreats back to one of the other characters in one of the other stories. I can't recall specifically, but I think five levels deep into this obsessively framed story before I finally gave up. I tried couple years later to read it again, but I got buried again. Still, I gave it one more try, same result. I am a tenacious reader (have read Under the Volcano and Naked Lunch each a couple times through) yet this book defeated me. Still, I like it. It also has an interesting history, supposedly a "found" manuscript, but that may be an apocryphal claim by the writer or publisher to make it more mysterious. I may give it a fourth try in my retirement.