A young Walloon officer called Alphonse van Worden travels through the Sierra Morena on his way to Madrid to join the Spanish army. Along the way he has an erotic encounter with two demonic Moorish sisters, falls foul of shape-shifting apparitions and is tested by a Jewish Kabbalist attempting to use mystical formulas to control spirits and decipher the universe. All these things happen in what might be one of the least-known great novels of the European canon, an encyclopedic roman-monde written more than 200 years ago called The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Structured like a Chinese box, with narratives nested within narratives, the book spans a period from the birth of Jesus Christ up to the beginning of the 19th century, and evokes places ranging from the Mediterranean and north Africa to Mexico, Peru and the Philippines. Salman Rushdie once described it in the Guardian as redolent of “the most brilliant modern novels, as if it were written yesterday”, while the curators of a new exhibition in Switzerland hail it as “a western version of One Thousand and One Nights”. Read more
Tag: Polish Authors
An Introduction to Stanislaw Lem, the Great Polish Sci-Fi Writer, by Jonathan Lethem
Who was Stanislaw Lem? The Polish science fiction writer, novelist, essayist, and polymath may best be known for his 1961 novel Solaris (adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkosvky in 1972 and again by Steven Soderbergh in 2014). Lem’s science fiction appealed broadly outside of SF fandom, attracting the likes of John Updike, who called his stories “marvelous” and Lem a poet of “scientific terminology” for readers “whose hearts beat faster when the Scientific American arrives each month.” Updike’s characterization is but one version of Lem. There are several more, writes Jonathan Lethem in an essay for the London Review of Books, penned for Lem’s 100th anniversary – at least five different Lems with five different literary personalities. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘The Books of Jacob’ is finally here. Now we know why the Nobel judges were so awestruck.
The challenges here — for author and reader — are considerable. After all, Tokarczuk isn’t revising our understanding of Mozart or presenting a fresh take on Catherine the Great. She’s excavating a shadowy figure who’s almost entirely unknown today … As daunting as it sounds, The Books of Jacob is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Despite his best efforts, Frank never mastered alchemy, but Tokarczuk certainly has. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft’s translation, infuses many of the sections. What’s more, it turns out that the story of an 18th-century grifter inflated by Messianic delusions is surprisingly relevant to our own era. The quality that makes The Books of Jacob so striking is its remarkable form. Tokarczuk has constructed her narrative as a collage of legends, letters, diary entries, rumors, hagiographies, political attacks and historical records … This is a story that grows simultaneously more detailed and more mysterious … Haunting and irresistible. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
