How long does it take to read The Saragossa Manuscript?
Jan Potocki
The Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki takes about 8 hours 28 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 28 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1950. 462 pages, about 127,050 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 7 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 28 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 18 minutes |
The page count is the median across 45 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A set of tales within a tale of a wandering a French army officer's encounters of the supernatural as he travels after the siege of Saragossa. According to the preface by Roger Caillois, it was originally published in St. Petersburg around 1804 by the Polish writer Count Jan Potocki and part of the work was published in Paris in 1893. The French version was published in Polish in 1847 and several editions came out during the next century. Additional parts of the French version were found in Cracow in around 1956. This version follows the St. Petersburg text and does not include the new fragments. The tales are marvelous. They contain illusion and fantasy as the characters tell their stories. The narrator (Officer) has a difficult time determining what is real, and so will you. There is death and corpses, beguiling spirit temptresses, phantoms, cabala, gypsies and much more - sometimes there is even a thread to connect the tales! As a bonus, try to find the film version, which is just as fascinating. The entire film, but in segments, is available on YouTube in Polish. Somewhere, there is a version with English subtitles, which certainly adds to the dialog if you don't understand Polish.
Subjects: Adventure stories, French fiction, Social life and customs, Fiction, Fiction, general, Spain, fiction
