The Manuscript Found in Saragossa » (Reprint)

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.