Friday, May 25, 2012

Portrait of a Lady, Manuscript found in Saragossa

I've given up on Portrait of a Lady.  No good reason, but I just wasn't particularly enjoying it.

I'm now in the middle of Jan Potocki's Manuscript found in Saragossa, a very odd novel indeed.  In some ways, it's a fairly modern book, despite being written in the 18th century.  The closest analog I can think of is Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales, with its stories-within-stories.

In this novel, we follow a young officer of the Walloon guards as he stays the night in a possibly haunted inn, meets up with a cabbalist and his sister, then some gypsies, and then even the wandering Jew.  As he travels with them, these characters tell him (and each other) their stories, which sometimes involve others' stories, which can even involve other stories still.

One big difference from the Valente book is that there's also a lot of cross-cutting.  There are three outer stories being narrated, and Potocki switches among them quickly.  His characters are also more aware of how dizzying it can all be than are Valente's, as this little excerpt shows (a mathematician is complaining about the Gypsy King's story):
‘Really, this story alarms me. All the gypsy’s stories begin in a simple enough way and you think you can already predict the end. But things turn out quite differently. The first story engenders the second, from which a third is born, and so on, like periodic fractions resulting from certain divisions which can be indefinitely prolonged. In mathematics there are several ways of bringing certain progressions to a conclusion, whereas in this case an inextricable confusion is the only result I can obtain from all the gypsy has related'

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