Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 3 vol.

Jan Potocki (1761-1815) was a Polish nobleman. He was educated in French from childhood, and throughout his life he thought and wrote in this language, the lingua franca of the European intelligentsia of the time. His life coincided with a period of great upheaval throughout Europe. In the turmoil that followed the French Revolution up to the Napoleonic Wars, Potocki's homeland, Poland, was partitioned three times by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and disappeared from the map. During this period of unrest, Potocki was sometimes involved in politics, sometimes in historical research, and traveled to many different places throughout his life.
The setting for The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1810) is the Sierra Morena Mountains in southern Spain. It is here that the protagonist, Alphonse van Worden, meets various characters and hears their stories. Each of these stories is nested together like a Russian matryoshka doll, and eventually the novel takes on the complex structure of a large cathedral. Here and there in the enigmatic plot, where Christianity, Islam, and Judaism intertwine, is the secret of the Gomelez family.
The story begins in the Sierra Morena Mountains and goes between a vast area, from the Viceroyalty of New Spain in Latin America to as far away as the Arabian Peninsula and Persia. The characters are diverse: aristocrats, soldiers, gypsies, Muslim sisters, kabbalists, geometers, and the list goes on and on. When I checked the number of characters, I found that there were 105 people who had been given names. I devised a style with which the reader does not confuse these characters of different statuses, genders, ages, and ethnicities. Potocki's writing is always neat and elegant, even when recounting ridiculous events. I hope that many readers will experience this mysterious adventure into the secrets of the Gomelez family.