This is a novel written by a Polish nobleman. He wrote it in French, working on it over a span of roughly twenty years, and its final form isn't necessarily his final draft, as the author committed suicide while still crafting it. There is no known extant copy of the complete novel in the original French, so roughly 20% instead only exists as a Polish translation of the missing original. That 20% was later translated back into French, so that the novel could exist in something at least close to its original form.
With me so far?
The novel itself purports to be a manuscript found in a locked safe and written in Spanish. The finder, a French soldier, is taken prisoner by the Spanish army and discovers that the commander in charge of the unit that has captured him is a descendant of the writer of the manuscript, and proceeds to translate it into French to share the stories within. The manuscript's writer, one Alphonse von Worden, is a Walloon (read: French-speaking Belgian) soldier who, through a series of misadventures, finds himself stuck in a small valley in Andalusia, traveling around and meeting those who live there, and hearing stories they tell about themselves and their families. He records the stories being told in his diary over the 66 days he spends in the Andalusian countryside. Those stories may include other stories within them, which may contain further stories within them...
Yeah. This is possibly the most intricately-nested set of stories I've ever read. There are several times that the narrative ends up five layers deep.
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a difficult book to sum up. I'd suggest that it's unfilmably so, except that a film exists (albeit one that is three hours long). In fact, I actually have it on DVD, somewhere. It's tempting to directly compare this work with the Thousand and One Nights and the serialized storytelling of Scheherazade, but there's a significant difference between the two sets of stories, primarily in the way that the whole collection of stories is working toward a single unified tale. There's a whole tapestry being woven here, where multiple of the characters have linked backstories, and especially toward the end of the work, people who figure in one story appear in others, from a different perspective.
The central thematic concern is the mystery of the Gomelez, a Moorish clan of sorts that possesses untold and seemingly endless wealth, living in the ruins of a castle and a network of hidden caves under the valley that Alphonse's narrative takes place in. For much of the book, it's unclear just what the full nature of the events that befall Alphonse might be; the existence of the supernatural is treated as a matter of course, with several stories dealing with magic or ghosts. Characters appear and disappear in different guises, and the longest of the tales, that of the gypsy chief Pandesowna, involves repeated instances of changing his appearance and identity in order to navigate his world.
The book reads surprisingly modern; while part of that may be due to its position as a somewhat recent work in translation (and re-translation, as it were), it equally has a sort of out-of-time quality to it, where even though the characters refer to historical figures that were active and that they might have encountered in their adventures, there is little knowledge of the political climates of 17th and 18th century Europe necessary to understand what's going on. Rather, the far more interesting aspect to this work is the way that it shifts so cleanly between genres, as the various tales take shape, and the way that every narrator has a noticeably different voice, but with everything being in service of Alphonse's journey, each of the twenty or so individual tales is able to possess a completely different feel without being utterly jarring.
It's a fascinating piece of literature, to be sure. Perhaps the only truly disappointing thing I can say about it is that the end felt rather rushed, though that may be a function of the author's cutting-short of his own authorship. Even so, the vast majority of questions were answered, and few loose threads were left over. If nothing else, that serves to show how carefully-crafted this work is.
