Was One of the Great Novels of the Enlightenment Written by a Man Who Thought He Was a Werewolf?

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