Book description
Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment
in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a
highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands,
cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records
over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty
years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters
transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and
cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant
polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of
literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in
his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales
from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic
scale.
