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Title: Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki, Brian Stableford, Christine Donougher ISBN: 0-946626-67-7 Publisher: Dedalus, Ltd Pub. Date: August, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $8.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Traveler's Tales
Comment: This is a huge, creaking, Spanish galleon of a book. Centered on tales told by travelers during a sixty-six day mule trip through the mountains of 18th century Spain, it begins to wear on the reader rather like such an arduous journey might. Still, you stick with it, for the scenery if not the destination. It is broken up into reasonably sized chapters, and the chapters are often broken down further into "tales", so you can readily find places to lay it down. The problem is, that the tales are divided and interwoven so intricately, that if you lay it down too many times, then you have to backtrack to refamiliarize yourself with the story and the characters.
You have a little of everything in this book, it is really a rather amazing assemblage. You have stories dealing with adventure, romance, the supernatural, history, humor, philosophy, moral instruction, etc. Not only that, but the stories are related by a wide variety of characters in their own words- men and women; Christian, Moslem, and Jew. Yet it is all at least loosely tied into the overall frame work of the story of a young officer of the Walloon Guards, Alphonse van Worden, traveling to Madrid to take up his command- and his relation to the mysterious Gomelez family, and to two hanged brothers- and the remarkable way that characters tend to awaken beneath their common gallows.

Even one of the characters in the story, a mathematician, repeatedly states that he has to use mathematical notation to keep all the different storylines straight.

I personally believe that the author, Jan Potocki, used this book as a framework to tell the tales that he heard during a lifetime as an adventurer. He was famed for his travels from Siberia to Egypt. Moreover, the late 18th century and early 19th century were a time of story telling. Travelers entertained each other nightly with tales told around an inn or campfire. Story telling was an extremely valuable and respected skill in those days. Potocki here seems to use this book to as a place to hang every remarkable tale that he has ever heard in a remarkable life.