It is 1739 and Alphonse van Worden, a Walloon officer serving the King of Spain, spends the night in a haunted inn in the Sierra Morena where he is plunged into a series of adventures, by turns mysterious, erotic and nightmarish. Convinced that he is being hunted by the Inquisition, he joins a band of wanderers - including a gypsy chief, a geometer, a cabbalist and the Wandering Jew himself - who travel aimlessly while regaling their companions with a hundred and more stories, and stories within stories, told over the course of sixty-six 'days', each day as disorienting as a thousand and one nights. And this nest of stories frames yet more stories driving the reader ever deeper into a labyrinth of sadism, satanism, the cabbala and other phantoms brought forth by the sleep of eighteenth-century Reason. For as well as being one of the great masterpieces of subversion, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is also an encyclopedia of the dark side of the European Enlightenment. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was written in French, probably between 1797 and 1815; this new translation makes the full text available in English for the first time.
These eight short plays by Louis Carmontelle, Thomas Gueulette, Jan Potocki, and Russian Empress Catherine II the Great (of all people!) were all the rage in eighteenth-century France--short skits that could easily be performed by amateur companies. Since they weren't writing "literature," the authors of these pieces could create anything without adhering to the "dramatic rules." And invent they did! Bawdy, even obscene humor permeates many of these works. All of them are wacky, anything-for-a-laugh comedies with little or no attention paid to logic, plots, or themes--just a series of zany, lewd, funny actions near enough to reality to be slightly discomfiting to the popular audiences who loved them. And they still remain as sidesplitting today as they were 200 years ago!
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