Description

Alphonse, a Walloon official, is going to join his program in Madrid in 1739. But he quickly finds herself inexplicably arrested in a freeway motel in the unusual and diverse business of robbers, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose tales he records over sixty six times. The resulting manuscript is found some forty years later in a closed coffin, that stories of heroes changed through illusion, magic and cover, of cowardice and honor, of seductions and hauntings, jump forth to produce a lively polyphony of individual sounds. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) utilized a variety of literary types - medieval, picaresque, journey, pastoral, erotica - in his book of stories-within-stories, which, such as the "Decameron" and "Tales from the Thousand and One Nights", offers amusement on an unbelievable level.