Zee en aarde : de omzwervingen van Maqroll el Gaviero

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll the Gaviero #1-7

by Álvaro Mutis

De omzwervingen van Maqroll el Gaviero. Omnibus. Zeven prachtige romans van een van de grootste Latijns-Amerikaanse schrijvers van de twintigste eeuw.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Spanish Literature, Short Stories, Latin American, Novels, Literary Fiction

765 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 1993

About the author

Novelista y poeta colombiano. Uno de los grandes escritores hispanoamericanos contemporáneos. Autor destacado por la riqueza verbal de su producción y una característica combinación de lírica y narratividad. A lo largo de su carrera literaria ha recibido, entre otros, el Premio Xavier Villaurrutia en 1988, el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras en 1997, el Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana en 1997, el Premio Cervantes en 2001 y el Premio Internacional Neustadt de Literatura en 2002.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship… And some persons sail through their life like this ship…

This was fated to happen to me. To me and nobody else. Some things I’ll never learn. Their accumulated presence in one’s life amounts to what fools call destiny. Cold comfort.

Wheels within wheels… Stories within stories… The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll goes as a fabulous maelstrom of misfortune… Sinbad the Sailor of the Arabian Nights meets the Wandering Jew of the medieval folklore…

Life attacks us like a blind beast. It swallows up time, the years of our life, it passes like a typhoon and leaves nothing behind. Not even memory, because memory is made of the same swift, ungraspable substance out of which illusions emerge and then disappear.

Wanderlust and love are two propulsive forces that don’t let Maqroll stay in one place, they don’t allow him to have any rest and they carry him all around the world like dust blown by the wind…

A woman’s body under the rush of a mountain waterfall, her brief cries of surprise and joy, the movement of her limbs in the rapid foam that carries red coffee berries, sugarcane pulp, insects struggling to escape the current: this is exemplary happiness that surely never comes again.

Wherever one goes one seeks love.

[Fionnuala]

I usually tell people that I met Maqroll the 'Gaviero' for the first time on June 3rd, 2015, but our acquaintance actually dates from much earlier. In December 2012, my good friend Benvolio di Adelaido introduced me to him, but not without a noticeable hesitation. And although the name Maqroll immediately caught my attention, evoking such disparate places as Scotland and the Middle East, I had so much confidence in Benvolio’s judgement that I did not try to pursue a friendship with Maqroll at that point, preferring to keep my distance from such a nomadic and mysterious-sounding character.

More than a year later I chanced to have a conversation with another good friend, Antonio Obrigado, and his firm championing of the Gaviero, though typically enigmatic, caused me to rethink my opinion of Maqroll, and to resolve to meet him properly at the earliest opportunity. I immediately set out to visit the places the elusive Gaviero was said to frequent and I eventually tracked him down. I kept a close eye on his movements for a long period after that but without making any direct contact. It would be interesting to pause at this point in the account and attempt to analyse the reasons for this delay, because reasons there certainly were, and some of them well worth examining, but I risk losing the thread of my account, and who knows where I may end up, and the reader along with me. I will therefore leave digressions to such writers as Àlvaro Mutis, for whom asides are as natural as breathing.

Since, unlike Mutis, the reader’s needs are always to the forefront of my own attention, I will return forthwith to the account of my meeting with the Gaviero. About three months ago, I finally worked up the courage to approach Maqroll directly. Everything was set up: the time, the place, the conditions, all seemed suitably propitious. However, just as I set out to meet him, another acquaintance of long date chanced to cross my path and I was sidetracked into a complex and rewarding adventure that I won’t go into here but which meant putting off any attempt to contact the Gaviero for quite some time.

The reader is now in possession of the background, indeed the background to the background, of my meeting with Maqroll, and I am certain that those concerned will be relieved to hear that I am now fast forwarding to the actual event itself.

The long-awaited encounter took place in the confined space of an airline cabin. I believe that had it not been for the fact that neither of us could take leave of the other in that early stage of our acquaintance, I would not now be writing about my adventures with Maqroll; we would certainly have parted company within a short time had we met on terra firma and might never have realised how enjoyable we would eventually find each other’s company. I speak for myself, of course, but knowing something at this stage of the Gaviero’s character, I believe that he enjoyed our time together as much as I did.

However, our contact was not without its misadventures, although I believe they too brought us closer. As I’ve already stated, we met on a journey, and although we lost sight of each other at our destination, the Gaviero joined me again a week later on the return trip during which I unfortunately suffered a minor accident which meant that we spent time together not only in airport lounges and railway stations, but in waiting rooms of various sorts where we shared insipid coffee served in paper cups, not the Gaviero's favourite beverage, I hasten to add.

Maqroll was the perfect companion for those waiting times; he slowly recounted the many long and labyrinthine episodes of his adventurous and oftentimes dangerous life, episodes that were remarkably full of coincidences and fortuitous circumstances, and not without a certain dramatic tension while occasionally leaning towards the mysterious, at times even towards the outright metaphysical; Maqroll knows better than most how to pose the unanswerable proposition.

The dreams I had during that time were particularly interesting; sometimes it seemed to me that I’d heard news of Maqroll’s death, and was so certain of this fact that I was considerably startled when I discovered on waking that the dreadful event had never happened. In other dreams, I felt I was constantly searching for forgotten things, that even those I remembered slipped between my fingers like a fish wriggling out of my grasp. In still others, Maqroll appeared to me as several people, each with more than one lifetime’s worth of adventures to recount.

Maqrol would argue that we readers all live many lifetimes. He himself is an insatiable reader, a tireless and lifelong consumer of books, and in the course of our journeys, he shared his favourite volumes with me so that I feel our short time together has left me with access to an entire library of works I might never otherwise have sampled; Chateaubriand was not on my list but he is now; Cervantes had already earned his place but has been moved up; Virgil and Simenon, I'm considering.

I will never forget the solid, warm humanity of Maqroll, this unusual man whose nationality I never learned, as I never learned the correct pronunciation of his name, or whether it was Scottish, Turkish or Iranian. Sometimes, I am almost convinced that I myself have lived Maqroll’s wandering life, and that I have met the strange people he described to me. He and they are etched in my memory henceforth and forever.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This New York Review Books edition contains seven linked novellas by the great Colombian poet and novelist Álvaro Mutis. Here is my review of the first three:

THE SNOW OF THE ADMIRAL
For John Updike, The Snow of the Admiral is “rendered so vividly as to furnish a metaphor for life as a colorful voyage to nowhere.”

Maqroll the Gaviero - our intrepid trekker. The bulk of The Snows of the Admiral consists of a very personal diary written by the Gaviero (the Lookout) chronicling his journey up the Xurandó River through jungle in a diesel-powered barge. Xurandó, such an apt name for Álvaro Mutis's fictional river since the sound and spelling blend in so well with a number of indigenous Amazonian tribespeople: the Xipaya, the Xiriana, the Txikao, the Kaxarari.

How much can a reader cherish Maqroll? The Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas threatened to sue Mr. Mutis if he ever killed off his beloved character. And Álvaro Mutis himself spoke of Maqroll as if he were a living person. After reading The Snow of the Admiral, the first of seven linked novellas forming The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, I likewise treasure the Gaviero and plan to join him on all his other quests right to the final paragraph of this 700-page modern classic.

Such passion for literature, Gonzalo Rojas! Likewise, John Updike, myself, and I’m supremely confident many other readers hold a special place for author Álvaro Mutis’s colorful, lovable voyager.

There's also that fascinating story behind the publication of The Snow of the Admiral: Back in 1986, the Columbian author, age 63, is editing one of his prose poems and realizes it “wasn’t a poem but a piece of a novel.” Then, with a sense of fatigue, Mr. Mutis processed to write a prose narrative and send the manuscript to his Barcelona agent along with a note telling her “I don’t know what the devil this is.” She replied back informing him what he wrote was “quite simply a wonderful novel.” And, give praise to the gods of literature, over the next five year, Álvaro Mutis proceeded to write six more short novels about Maqroll. Quite a feat for an author who spent a forty-five year career publishing not novels but poetry.

The New York Review Books edition of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll is ideal - in addition to all seven novellas published together in English for the first time as one book, also included is an informative introductory essay written by Francisco Goldman, himself a celebrated novelist and friend of the author.

In his Introduction, Mr. Goldman relates the time when Álvaro Mutis spent his entire two week vacation sitting in a garden reading a stack of Charles Dickens novels morning until night. As Mr. Mutis told Francisco Goldman directly: “A real influence is an author who communicates an energy and a great desire to tell a story. And it isn't that you write like Dickens, but rather that when you read Dickens, you feel an imaginative energy which you use to your own ends.” Worth mentioning since many critics reading about Maqroll’s tropical river journeys compare the author to Joseph Conrad but it is Charles Dickens who is the prime influence for Álvaro Mutis.

Turning to The Snow of the Admiral, I’ll never forget in the first pages the narrator relating his purchase of a rare volume from a Barcelona secondhand bookstore only to notice tucked inside the back cover a diary written in tiny, cramped handwriting, a diary written by one Maqroll the Gaviero during his journey up a jungle river.

Likewise, Maqrill’s description of the captain as always semi-inebriated from steady drinking that keeps him in a state of euphoria alternating with a drowsy stupor; the mechanic, an Indian who speaks to the captain in a mixture of different languages; the pilot who reminds Maqroll of a menacing character from Little Dorrit (Álvaro Mutis and his voracious reading of Charles Dickens!); Maqroll’s fellow passenger, a calm blond giant speaking with a Slavic accent.

Or, when one nightfall, after the barge’s propeller hits a root, they’re forced to pull up on a sandy beach and a family of beautiful, tall, naked natives with their hair cut in the shape of a helmet and their teeth filed to points appear unexpectedly. And that night, Maqroll is aroused from a deep sleep by the Indian woman and shortly thereafter enters her and feels himself sinking into a bland, unresisting wax, all the time a putrid stench clinging to his body.

And yet again the way in which Maqroll recalls his own recurrent failures and how he, at least in his own mind, keeps giving destiny the slip. Also the Gaviero's recounting his various vivid dreams and fantasies along with establishing certain precepts, among which “Everything we can say about death, everything we try to embroider around the subject, is sterile, entirely fruitless labor. Wouldn’t it be better just to be quiet and wait? Don’t ask that of humans. They must have a profound need for doom; perhaps they belong exclusively to its kingdom.”

Then there are major episodes of the voyage, among which an old-style Junker seaplane landing near the barge and the appearance of a stern major who immediately takes complete control, the illness of Maqroll himself and his report of the near-death experience, the surprise encounter at Maqroll’s destination far up the jungle river.

But more than anything, the lush, poetic, intoxicating language, the full expanse of what it means to write sublime prose. Obviously, all those year Álvaro Mutis wrote his poetry exerted a profound influence on his writing his novellas. To take but one spectacular sentence as an example:

“I could discover that my true home is up there in the deep ravines where giant ferns sway, in the abandoned mine shafts and the damp, dense growth of the coffee plantings covered in the astonishing snow of their flowers or the red fiesta of their berries, in the groves of plantain trees, with their unspeakably soft trunks and the tender green of their reverent leaves so welcoming, so smooth: in the rivers crashing down against the great sun-warmed boulders, the delight of reptiles that use them for their lovemaking and their silent gatherings; in the dizzying flocks of parrots that fly through the air, as noisy as a departing army, to settle in the tops of the tall cambulo trees.”

After reading The Snow of the Admiral (the name of a memorable eatery for Maqroll, by the way), I was inspired to come up with the following quote: "Great literature is the opium of the book reviewer." I highly recommend joining Maqroll’s trip upriver. Completely addictive.

ILONA COMES WITH THE RAIN (Ilona llega con la lluvia)
This Álvaro Mutis novella, the second in a series of seven forming The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, could carry the subtitle: A Tale of Freedom and Fate. And the more we turn the pages, the deeper we dive into this tale, the progressively more gripping. Since the storyline is simply too good and loaded with too many unexpected twists, I’ll steer clear of plot and offer comments on the following people, places and things:

Frame: The narrator, author of the six chapters we are about to read, recounts his many conversations with Maqroll wherein he would revisit key episodes of the Gaviero’s tale again and again until they were fixed in his memory so he could write in a way that would allow “our friend” to speak directly to the reader. One thing the narrator (who might or might not be Álvaro Mutis himself) takes pains to make clear is the past and future held little consequence for Maqroll; rather, the adventurer gave the impression “his exclusive and absorbing purpose was to enrich the present with everything he happened upon.” To my mind, one of the glories of the human experience: storytelling as enrichment.

Globetrotting Gaviaro: Our protagonist is an adventurer, a radical individualist, which ultimately boils down to life as a solo journey – lovers and friends are embraced at the next port or on the next barge, but when it's time to move on, you travel alone. If there is any one of the seven Álvaro Mutis novellas placing Maqroll's wandering philosophy in bold capital letters, it is Ilona Comes with the Rain.

Colorful Portrayals: Maqroll looks out at the dock in Cristóbal; he’s under the command of a luckless Captain of a dilapidated freighter painted the garish yellow of a yellow-tailed parrot, a captain who is about to have his boat taken away and who goes by the name of Witto - thin, of medium height with bushy brows covering his eyes, a man of slow, precise speech and who bares the mark of defeat, one with a secret emotional disorder who moves through life as if needing to hide a deep, painful psychic wound. Reading Álvaro Mutis is a literary feast – characters, landscapes, city streets, everything described in vibrant, memorable detail.

Panama City: Once in this bustling metropolis, his first time ever, all blaring car horns and howling sirens, Maqroll knows in advance he’ll never encounter anyone he will recognize. All new faces – just the way he likes it. First off, after making arrangements at a not so rundown hotel, he locates an ideal bar, quiet, attentive but not overly talkative bartender and returns to his hotel room drunk that night.

I’ll never forget the Gaviero’s shock the next morning at finding an enormous, naked black woman with Zulu warrior hair asleep beside him. He gives her some money and kicks her out. Ditto the next morning after yet again another drunken night at the bar, only this time she’s a terrified bleach blonde. No money exchanged, Maqroll simply kicks her out and goes down to pay a visit to the concierge. He assures Maqroll it will never happen again. The next week the rainy season hits like a tornado, turning the city streets into impossible to cross rivers. Our adventurer hunkers down in his hotel room and reads. Ah, books to the rescue! Then it happens: paying a visit to one of the city's casinos, he recognizes a past love: the alluring, captivating Ilana.

Ilona: Tall, blonde, athletic, age forty-five, spirited Ilona has a comparable sense of life as an ever expanding adventure. Ilona the Vivacious and Maqroll the Gaviero – quite a team; their common adversary: boredom and monotony. Ilona and Maqroll have rousing success in Panama City (a ton of loot and a ton of fun) operating their new, creative business venture (unique upscale house of prostitution). But they reach a point, surprise, surprise, for restless adventurers, where an added infusion of energy is called for – and they get what they’re after in the form of a beauty with long jet black hair and mysterious past – Larissa.

The Fourth Dimension: At this point Álvaro Mutis kicks his tale into what some might term magical realism or the fantastic or the supernatural. Gripping is understatement. Maqroll is unhinged, as is Ilona; she confides in the Gaviero: “Something in Larissa awakens my demons, those ominous signs in me that I learned to tame when I was a girl, to keep anesthetized so they don’t come up to the surface and put an end to me.”

Coda: As noted above, this novella hits squarely on the philosophical dimensions of fate and freedom. Good luck and bad luck could be added to the mix. With Larissa the stakes are raised. All of a sudden our two adventurers are caught in an episode of life and death. A tale not to be missed.

UN BEL MORIR
The third in a series of seven novellas forming The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by the great Columbian author Álvaro Mutis, the only one in the series not written in intimate first person.

Why the switch in voice? Maqroll is an older man in this tale – a specific age is not given but one can infer the Gaviero is in his sixties. Perhaps an objective third person narrator provides a more panoramic lens, an opportunity to step back and view the arc of Maqroll’s entire life from a distance.

In similar spirit, perhaps also it is no coincidence Un Bel Morir returns to the landscapes of Maqroll's childhood - in and around a river town near coffee plantations nestled in the Andes Mountains, a small town by the name of La Plata (not the city south of Buenos Aires in Argentina). This is a tale of high adventure, a thriller with a cast of colorful characters. Here are several:

Doña Empera: Blind old woman who runs the boardinghouse where Maqroll spends an entire two months lolling about, paying visits to the local tavern or in his room overlooking the gently murmuring, tobacco colored river where he occasionally reads about the life of Saint Francis of Assisi or from a two volume set containing letters of the Prince of Ligne. On occasion the Gaviero will even read aloud to Doña Empera, a trusted and knowledgeable source of information on all matters relating to La Plata, including the young women who come down from the mountains to provide companionship for men.

Anparo Maria: Columbian Aphrodite with a stern, fierce Gypsy air, a lady of few, well-chosen words who hungers for affection. And she receives what she’s after every time she pays a visit to the Gaviero. Is it any surprise this sensual lovely and the aging adventurer form a bond of the heart? At times Anparo Maria reminds Maqroll of Flor Estévez and at others Ilana Grabowska (Readers will be familiar with Flor from The Snow of the Admiral; Ilana from Ilana Comes with the Rain). The Gaviero considers Anparo Maria a gift from the gods, in all likelihood at this point in his life, the last he will receive.

Jan van Branden: Over the course of several evenings between drinks down at the town tavern, this burly red-bearded Belgium talks Maqroll into transporting equipment up a mountain as part of a railroad project. The Galviaro smells a rat. Is van Branden really Belgium? Does he, in fact, have a background in engineering? Are those crates loaded with railroad equipment or something highly illegal and maybe even dangerous? He initially vacillates but ultimately surrenders and accepts the proposition. Hey, the Gaviero might be old but he still has the fire of risk and adventure in his soul. After all, sitting around the boardinghouse reading books to an old blind woman strikes him as a less appealing alternative. He reflects: “The real tragedy of aging lay in the fact that an eternal boy still lives inside us, unaware of the passing of time.”

The Helpers: Rancher Don Anibal offers hospitality and seasoned advice as the Gaviero makes his way up the mountain. There’s danger around every bend. Maqroll is joined by Zuro, a young man who proves an invaluable sidekick, an expert mule driver, desperately needed as mules are carrying the load. On one trek up Zuro warns Maqroll, “Be careful of your sleep senor, Señor. You need to stay alive. In the barrens altitude the exhaustion make you dream a lot. It’s not good for you. You don’t get your strength back, and they’re never good dreams. Just nightmares. I know what I’m talking about: the foreigners who came to try mining all went crazy and tried to murder each other in the tavern or drowned themselves in the whirlpools in the river.”

Men in Uniform: The Gaviero usually has had to deal with both the police and the military at one point or the other during the misadventure part of his adventures. Never a totally satisfying or pleasant experience but Maqroll knows the drill only too well – either cooperate or in all likelihood lose your freedom or even your life. On this mountain adventure it isn’t any different. He’s seen it many times before. He is brought before a Captain Segura who demands his orders be followed without exception and a Captain Ariza who demands he repeat his story over and over without deviating from the truth. Follow orders? Repeat the truth? Fortunately Maqroll the Gaviero comes through as Maqroll the Gaviero – a most satisfying reading experience.

Lastly, permit me to underscore the sumptuous language and exquisite storytelling. There's good reason fans of Maqroll cherish Álvaro Mutis' cycle of seven novellas. And I'm sure Un Bel Morir is high on the list.

Special thanks to Goodreads friend Fionnuala for her engaging review of this book that inspired me to start reading. Link to her review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


Colombian author Álvaro Mutis, 1923-2013

“Weather is a purely personal matter. There is no such thing as a climate that is cold or hot, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. People take it upon themselves to create a fantasy in their imagination and call it weather. There's only one climate in the world, but the message that nature sends is interpreted according to strictly personal, non-transferable rules.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommend this to no one. No one.

Read your post-moderns and your initialed ones. Be cognoscenti.

Let this be my secret. My adultery.

I may have found the book to take on the getaway spaceship.

Jesus, sweet Jesus, this was good.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Maqroll, O Maqroll.

Who are you? What are you?

You are the Gaviero. The Lookout. But that was when you were a boy, at the top of the mast, searching the horizons. Since then you have been a wanderer.

No one knows where you were born. You speak many languages with many accents. Your Cypriot passport is suspect. You have "a serene acceptance of adversity" and, as you say, "a fatal tendency to interpret the law in my own way." Your best friend said of you, "He's more alone than anyone, and more than anyone else he needs the people who love him." And, as it turns out, there are many.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Because this is long, with pages-long paragraphs, and first written in Spanish, there are natural, reflexive thoughts of Quixote. But this is not Quixote; it is not a picaresque and not a satire. And while there are adventures and travels, this is not a travelogue nor an adventure book. Although, our eponymous adventurer does face some tough spots. Enough to offer a remarkable 'prayer', a fragment which I offer here, because it tells much about what his story is. For whom does Maqroll pray:

In the name of the vessels that sink their prows into the abyss and then surface and repeat the ordeal over and over again

and at last, with a shifting cargo pounding their holds, sail wounded into the calm that follows the storm;

in the name of the knot of terror and fatigue in the throat of the machinist whose only knowledge of the sea is its blind assault on the sorrowfully creaking sides;

in the name of the song of the wind in the rigging of the derricks;

in the name of the vast constellations marking the route that the compass repeats with meticulous insistence;

in the name of the men on the third watch who murmur songs of forgetting and sorrow to keep back sleep;

in the names of the curlews flying away from the coast in closed formation and calling to console their young as they wait on the cliffs;

....

in the name of the lookout I once was when I was still a boy, searching for islands that never appeared,

announcing schools of fish that always escaped with an abrupt change of direction,

weeping for my first love, whom I never saw again,

enduring the bestial jokes of sailors in all the world's languages....

O, there's more, pages more.

in the name of a man who dreams of another man's woman while he paints minimum on a rusting hull;

...

in the name of the man who cried, whenever he got drunk enough to collapse onto a filthy tavern floor, "I'm not from around here and I don't look like anyone else!"

...

in the name of those now at sea;

in the name of those who sail tomorrow;

in the name of those coming into port now, who don't know what awaits them;

in the name of those who have lived, suffered, wept, sung, loved, and died at sea;

....calm your anger and do not rage against me.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___


This is unlike anything I have ever read before.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

It's too bad, maybe, that I have told everyone not to read this book because, in particular, I would be fascinated to read what female readers had to say about Mutis' treatment of female characters. It's varied, of course, because there are many characters. But he doesn't condescend.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___


You can tell, of course, without having to have read the book in the original: this is a superb translation.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___


There is an enveloping fatalism to this work, or at least to Maqroll, who says ultimately:

If it exists at all, the pity of the gods is indecipherable or comes to us when we breathe our last. There is no way to free ourselves from their arbitrary tutelage.


___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Thankfully, no one actually reads this stuff. So, Maqroll, my Maqroll, can be my little secret.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Amen.

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is August, a warm sultry August. An implacable heat hangs like a pall over the town, sapping energy from the veins, filming the skin with moisture, leaching purpose and efficiency out of my days to leave them washed in a colourless languid laziness.
I read. And for eight days I am transported in a flat-keeled barge up the Xurandó in search of an elusive and treacherous lumber factory; in a freighter painted a furious yellow that is impounded by a bank consortium and leaves me stranded in Panama City; on gruelling mule treks from La Plata up through the barrens to the Tambo; in a doomed tramp steamer from Helsinki to Costa Rica, Jamaica and San José de Amacuro; to gold mines in the Andes; to Marseilles, Tripoli, Alexandria and Istanbul, to La Rochelle, Saint-Malo, Southampton and Limassol. To Djakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Ecuador.
It feels like a defection. I abandon my mundane existence where the week's excitement is remembering to put the wheelie bin out on the right day. I'm on a hallucinatory trip. Stars wheel above me, I taste the clean bracing shock of an icy vodka, smell the putrefaction of rotting greenery, hear the lapping of water against the boat, the roar of the ocean, the crack of a revolver shot. I have a strange, extraneous vision, nothing to do with the sea or the tropics: I see a green forested mountain slowly turn over, stretch out, stand up, and walk away. This whole set of stories keep shape-shifting, transforming into metaphysical meditation instead of adventurous tale of risk-taking subversion.
Reading feels like betrayal. It feels like an assignment with a lover. For I would spend more time with Maqroll, if he would have me, for a while at least, for he is not a stayer (but we could have a good time). He is a man who people trust, although nothing is known of his background, family or nationality - how he came by a Cypriot passport is questionable at the very least. A man of integrity, although his undertakings are not always on the conventional side of legality. A man of warmth and loyal friendship. Multilingual. A reader, for chrissake.
And one who sees women. Really sees women.
But:

Life often renders its accounts, and it is advisable not to ignore them. They are a kind of bill presented to us so that we will not become lost deep in the world of dreams and fantasy, unable to find our way back to the warm, ordinary sequence of time where our destiny truly occurs.

So I must find my way back to the world of wheelie bins and reading the papers and watching the news, like grown-up people do. Here, in August, there are disturbing sea stories of people attempting the Mediterranean in vessels that are not seaworthy, there are people cast adrift and washed up on our shores, at our doors, wandering around on the browning grass outside the school gymnasium on the other side of the road where they are temporarily housed. Help is needed. Can I help? Interpreting perhaps, that's something I could do. But it's Arabic they need, or Croatian, do you speak Serbian at all? No? But they go swimming, you could translate the rules of the swimming pool into English for us. No pushing, no shoving, no horseplay. No diving in from the side. Walk, don't run.
Welcome to Germany.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and comic voyage of a book that at different times will evoke Heart of Darkness, Greek tragedy, Moby Dick, Sinbad’s voyages, King Solomon’s Mines, narratives of Proust and Nabokov, the rogue casts of Pynchon and Dickens, Don Quixote, Journey to the End of the Night, and Borges. These seven novellas form one novel are filled with stories that are comically absurd, fraught with menace or existential doom, and or both at the same time. The at times anachronistic feeling of the narrative, mix with the timelessness of the themes in a very effective way, and its underworld setting of rotting ports, abandoned and deadly mines, steaming jungles, whorehouses, army outposts, and rusty tramp steamers with its cast of terrorists, suicides, dreamers, psychopaths, homicidal dwarfs, drug dealers, soldiers, and the blind, are an endless riot, Adventure stories fill with wide eyed wonder but wrapped in a dreamy melancholy with ontological concerns. One of the great books of our time which I recommend wholeheartedly.

[Ben Winch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half of this book strikes me as brilliant, half as a testament to wasted talent. The brilliant bits can mostly be found in the earlier collection Maqroll, which comprises the first three of the seven novellas collected here. The first of these, 'The Snow of the Admiral' is easily the most potent, existing on another plane from the others entirely, and for this piece alone I give the book four stars. A first-person depiction, via a series of journal-entries, of a sinister boat journey up a South American river, this is exactly my cup of tea - hallucinatory, intense, enthralling, completely convincing. Mutis relates the genesis of this work in the introduction, telling of its evolution from a prose poem into a 300-page novel and back to the 100 pages we find here. This hard work shows; unfortunately, it also generates high expectations, which are not met by the other pieces. In the second piece, 'Ilona Comes With the Rain', a lazier, more expansive style takes hold, and despite some sharply-wrought moments (most of 'Un Bel Morir', parts of 'Amirbar', the hilarious first part of 'Abdul Bashur, Dreamer of Ships'), doesn't really let go for the remainder of the book. It's as if Mutis were becoming progressively drunker over the course of one of the sumptuous meals he takes such pleasure in describing (indeed, by the last pages the characters seem to do little more than eat and drink, despite that each story proclaims itself, in louder terms than the last, to be the most dramatic and life-changing of all). Apparently, after taking over 40 years to come up with one Maqroll novella (he invented the character at age 19 and wrote 'The Snow of the Admiral' at 63), he then churned them out at a rate of one a year. Why? Money? Obsession? Fear? True, Maqroll is a great character, the kind we miss when he's not around, and no matter how trite or sentimental Mutis's rendering of him he retains this spark of life to the end, but I for one found it painful to watch him drowning in the murk of Mutis's lazy storytelling. RIP Maqroll - you are already missed. That said, I'll be laying hands on Mutis's earlier work (stories and poems) if and when it finally makes it back into print.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life attacks us like a wild beast. It swallows up time, the years of our life, it passes like a typhoon and leaves nothing behind. Not even memory, because memory is made of the same swift, ungraspable substance out of which illusions emerge and then disappear. And how can anyone paint something like that?

‘Paint the wind’, the ineffable, is exactly what Alvaro Mutis is doing with these seven novels centred around the vagabond sailor Maqroll el Gaviero. Like his character, Mutis has travelled extensively and looked at the world around him with far seeing eyes, the eyes of a dreamer who searches for mythical islands beyond the horizon
In his sixth decade as an artist, Alvaro Mutis switched from poetry to prose, as a better medium for the tales he wanted to tell. The difference is largely academic, since the author still operates with symbols and metaphors and offers us sublime prose as a garment for the stories of Maqroll’s wanderings.

There at the top of the highest mast, in the crow’s nest where the lookout questions the horizon, all mystery vanishes in the flight of curlews and gulls and the crack of the sail in the wind, and nothing is left standing in us. Believe me!

El Gaviero, the man without a country and without law, gained his nickname from his job as a young seaman: to climb to the highest point on the ship and look for land and for dangers, to give warning to his mates in a loud and clear voice. The poet, in turn, gazes into the abyss and shouts back at us to beware and seize the day.
On another level, the long years spent all alone and looking towards distant illusions, have made Maqroll a misfit among his peers and have granted him a unique perspective about the human condition, separating the chaff from the kernels of truth.

I’ve learned the habit of deriving solid reasons to continue living from unfulfilled dreams.

Among Maqroll’s few and cherished friends is a painter named Alejandro Obregon, another seeker for artistic expression that is capable of bringing the mystery of life within grasp, a project as futile as the Gaviero’s impulsive and dangerous projects to get rich. [ ... an enterprise that is nothing but an illusion composed of scraps of rumors: vague miracles of wealth within reach, the kind of lucky break that never really happens to anyone. And I’m the ideal person to fall for it, no doubt about it. ]

Somewhere in Kuala Lumpur, getting drunk on cheap Canadian whisky and looking out for desirable women, Maqroll and Obregon translate for us the artistic position of Mutis:

“Look, Gaviero, the thing about painting is very simple – but also very complicated. It comes down to this: you always have to tell the truth. Just like in life, in a painting there’s only room for truth. That’s where the picture gambles on immortality. Lying means falsifying life – in other words, dying.”
[...]
Now, the important thing is to learn how to look, to get to know how to look, look at everything: objects, people, the sky, the mountains, the sea and all its creatures. Everything we look at always hides something, keeps it in shadow. That’s what you have to get to, what you have to illuminate, discover, decipher. Nothing can remain hidden. I know, it’s a lot to ask. But it can’t be helped.

And so, coming at me like a storm from an unexpected quarter, my own life is laid bare in the stories of this bedraggled one-time sailor who finds himself time and time again laid low on a foreign shore, penniless and weary and often battling a crippling illness, yet always on the lookout of a new opportunity, of a new scheme that he knows will end up in failure, while the new woman he meets and falls in love with will be as transient as the mist that rises out of the ocean in the morning.

... a familiar uneasiness came up through my stomach: it tells me when I’m beginning to stumble over the obstacles set up by reality if I’ve made the mistake of attempting to adjust it to the measure of my desires.

Maqroll, with his dogged insistence of following his dreams, despite decades of failures in reaching his imaginary destinations, is as emblematic to our modern times as the medieval Don Quixote battling the windmills on the Spanish plain. [ You remind me more of a monk who travels the world searching for his lost monastery. ] It may be a trip up a jungle river in search of sawmills, or a trove of precious Iranian carpets in an illegal warehouse, an abandoned gold mine in a high plateau in Central America or arms smuggling in a country plagued by civil war, dangerous fishing in the frozen waters off Alaska coast or running a bordello in Panama City – in each of the seven novels, the Gaviero battles his destiny in a fight whose outcome has already been decided elsewhere.

The best thing is to let everything happen as it must. That’s right. It’s not a question of resignation. Far from it. It’s something else, something to do with the distance that separates us from everything and everybody. One day we’ll know.
[...]
There you were, Gaviero you madman, lost as always. You’ll never learn, you with your air of a sailor who’s been thrown off his ship.

Death and disillusion are constant companions in Maqroll’s journeys. He often strays outside the letter of the law in his pursuit of improbable dreams, and his most dangerous encounters are with men who live by violence: army officers, guerillas, terrorists, custom officials and with people who lack imagination or kindness. In each of these seven novels, we know how they will end. The challenge is to try to uncover the secrets of el Gaviero’s endurance, what makes a man get up in the morning and keep trying when death is the only possible final port of call.

It’s all the same, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is something else: what we carry inside, the wild propeller that never stops spinning. That’s the secret, that’s what must never break down.

We may call this engine Hope, the one that springs eternal, the search for the perfumed islands with the beautiful hula dancers that are just beyond the horizon. Yet the world weary Gaviero has had decades of experience that tells him the search is futile. His best friend Abdul Bashur is another dreamer who all his life searched for the perfect tramp steamer – for both of them the journey becomes more important than the destination: the people, the sights and the memories they collect will become their lives.

I wouldn’t care if we turned back right now. I won’t, through pure inertia. As if it were just a matter of making this trip, seeing the jungle and sharing the experience with people I’ve met here, going back with new images, voices, lives, smells, deliriums, to add to all the other phantoms that walk with me, with no other purpose than to unravel the monotonous, tangled skein of time.

We then can replace Hope for Passion – to drink deeply from everything Life has to offer, from liquor and bar room fights to the embraces of women and the return of old friends, a good book to keep you company in times of trouble or a good listener for your storytelling. The Gaviero is truly blessed in his chosen companions, unconventional souls and rebels against the tedium of routine. They will offer love and friendship and, more often than not, financial aid sorely needed to extricate Maqroll from his latest broken dream.

We were joined in the unconquerable solidarity of those who do not want the world as it is offered to them but as they propose to make it.

What brings these solitary people together, what makes them recognize each other in various ports around the globe is the look in their eyes, the mark left by the wonders they have seen and by the pain of the experiences they had to go through. The Gaviero and his people close ranks against those unfortunate blind creatures who come to death without ever having suspected the marvel of the world or felt the miraculous passion which fires our knowledge that we are alive and that death, without beginning or end, a pure, limitless present, is a part of life. . As I am quickly approaching my sixth decade of broken dreams and fugitive loves, I feel the need of a true friend who will recognize that same look in my eyes and offer the same unlimited support and understanding.

Abdul Bashur, Ilona Rubenstein, Flor Estevez, Alejandro Obregon, Amparo Maria, Dona Empera and a precious few other kindred souls will enrich the Gaviero’s life with indelible memories. A special place among this coterie of knights tilting at windmills is the unnamed narrator of the seven tales, a friendly observer from the sidelines who shares many of the author’s biographical details, a man who likes to listen to stories late into the night, under a starry tropical sky that seems lifted wholesale from a Joseph Conrad tale.

We said it really wasn’t very late, that we were listening to him with growing interest. The bottle of bourbon was empty. I brought another, along with more ice, and we asked the Gaviero to continue his story. On summer nights in California, time stretches like an elastic, compliant material, perfect for hearing the confidences of someone who had a store of tales that could lead us from one marvel to another until dawn.

The connection with the great sailor and storyteller of Polish origins goes deeper than the framing device of a storyteller guiding us into the novels. For me, Gaviero and his friends are typical Conradian protagonists: drifters fascinated by the sea and by secret, exotic shores, people who already lost at the game of life yet are endlessly fascinated by the mystery of jungles and by the savage inhabitants of distant shores.
Reading Alvaro Mutis is like revisiting ‘Lord Jim’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Victory’ and ‘The Secret Sharer’, ‘Youth’ and ‘Typhoon’.
I might as well go back and meet my younger teenage self who dreamt of becoming a sailor and ead every sea story that fell into my hands. My omnibus of Joseph Conrad stories must be somewhere close by.

>>><<<>>><<<

I am both glad and troubled by my decision to read all seven short novels about Maqroll in one go. On the positive side of the balance, it was easier to see how they are all parts of a single portrait, like pieces of a puzzle that will form something more than the sum of its parts when assembled.
On the minus side, in my attempt to synthesize what is common to all the seven stories, I will necessary simplify the commentaries on each episode, losing some of the focus on the particulars of each adventure and the richness of the setting and of the secondary characters. I am also painfully aware of the limitations of the site – a comprehensive review will quickly get out of hand, such is the wealth of images and ideas and exquisite phrases offered by the collection. I tried to move some of my bookmarks to the quotes section, but they feel like orphans out there, out of context to anybody else but me.
A solution will be to re-read the seven novels and write individual reviews for each, but there are so many, many other books waiting their turn.
For the moment, here are the titles of the individual novels who are included in the collection:

The Snow of the Admiral
A doomed search up a river in the Amazonian jungle, reading books of ancient history and yearning for the high peaks of the Andes.

Ilona Comes With The Rain
Marooned on shore in Panama City, Maqroll is saved by the most fascinating woman he ever met.
She was in the habit of appearing and then disappearing from our lives. When she left she did so without making us feel responsible or giving us any reason to think of ourselves as deceived. When she returned she brought with her a renewed supply of enthusiasm and that characteristic ability of hers to disperse any clouds that may have gathered over us. One always began all over again with Ilona.

Un Bel Morir
Marooned once more in La Plata, a remote river port in a country torn by Civil War, Maqroll finds solace in his old books, love from a wild woman and danger from people who deal in death.
Get to the ocean – that’s your salvation.

The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call
Ships are the same as people: hard working, often set adrift in the storms of the world, bedraggled from hard use yet adamant in continuing the journey.

They earn a poor living, dragging their battered hulls along for many more years than their precarious condition might lead us to expect.

On such a ship, two unlikely people meet and fall in love, Jon Iturri and Warda, satellites in the gravitational pull of el Gaviero and Abdul Bashur. The fate of their love will be shared by the fate of the vagabond steamer.

Human beings, I thought, change so little, and are so much what they are, that there has been only one love story since the beginning of time, endlessly repeated, never losing its terrible simplicity or its irremediable sorrow.

Amirbar
Dreams of gold become nightmares in a wild and broken tropical landscape. A couple of memorable women make sure Maqroll can survive and escape back to the sea.

Abdul Bashur, Dreamer of Ships
El Gaviero’s closest friend, a Lebanese ship owner, fellow adventurer and chaser of impossible dreams. Another secret aspect of their endurance is revealed, something that I believe each of us tries to hide from the outside world:

He thought that the real tragedy of aging lay in the fact that an eternal boy still lives inside us, unaware of the passage of time.
A boy who claims the prerogative of not aging, since he carried that portion of broken dreams, stubborn hopes, and mad, illusory enterprises in which time not only does not count but is, in fact, inconceivable. One day the body sends a warning and, for a moment, we awake to the evidence of our own deterioration: someone has been living our life, consuming our strength. But we immediately return to the phantom of our spotless youth, and continue to do so until the final, inevitable awakening.

Tryptich on Sea And Land
Three stories that round up the amazing journey of the wandering Gaviero:

- The final goodbye to an old friend, the Scandinavian sailor named Sverre, who has grown tired of even the eternal promise of the sea, cradle of life and refuge from the follies of our species.

- The friendship with the painter Alejandron Obregon, an essay on the ancient craft of human tenderness

- Maqroll can still be surprised by life at his last port of call on the island of Mallorca. A six year old boy named Jamil teaches him that you can never stop dreaming and yearning.

Someone like you—no permanent home anywhere, a man whose life is unsettled and filled with sudden, drastic changes, a man who lives at the edge of lawbreaking and prison—you don't seem the ideal person to take care of a boy who isn't even five years old.
[...]
I had always been convinced that there was little to hope for from our fellow humans, who surely constitute the most harmful and superfluous species on earth. I still think so, each day with greater certainty, but instead of the tormenting anger and bitterness they once produced in me, I now feel something I would call indulgent tenderness. I believe that when they were children, the road they were meant to take was very different from the one they chose as adults.
But the truth is that I've come to an unhesitating acceptance of everything, through the example of this boy entering the dark human labyrinth that leads to a small heap of gray ashes.

[Brodolomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kolumbijsku književnost ne čini samo Markes. Postoji i Alvaro Mutis. Obojica su nosili brkove.

Mutis spada u one književnike koji su sebe smatrali pesnicima iako niko nije mario za njih dok su pisali stihove. Pišući pesme, stvarao je heteronime, a jedan od njih bio je Makrol Osmatrač, melanholični mornar nenadmašnog dostojanstva velikog gubitnika. Makrol bi, verovatno, ostao da plovi tajnim i ezoteričnim krugovima latinoameričke poezije, nepoznat široj čitalačkoj pučini, da Mutis nije odlučio da sa Makrolom isplovi u šire prostranstvo proze. Ovo izdanje obuhvata sabrane pripovetke o Osmatraču i ljudima iz njegove okoline. Očigledno započete kao ekces, čitaoci su se namnožili, prestup se osladio, te iako posle svake pripovetke čitalac ima utisak da na odjavnoj špici piše That’s All Folks, priče su se nizale, a opet, autor je imao takta kada da se zaustavi kako bi uzbegao eksploataciju. Reč je o avanturističkom žanru, pri čemu je je avanturama izvučena pustolovna srž, umesto koje je podmetuta refleksivnost, te imamo otežalu lepršavost koja se kreće ali ne leti. U ovim pustolovina ima mnogo više čekanja, nego akcije; i to baš onog (ne)svetog čekanja - sva praznina bezimenog vremena, iskorišćenog potrebom za upravljanjem, marljivim radom, putovanjima, besposlenim danima, pogrešnim maršrutama. Makrol i kolege su proživeli svoje zlatne dane, ali i teška vremena, mnogo pre događaja o kojima se pripoveda; sada samo hodaju zlatnom stazom gubitništva. Recimo, kao da ste na žurki gde je najbolji deo večeri već prošao, sve važno se odigralo, umor u nogama osećate, pije vam se a želudac odbija, shvatate da ste zaglušujući žamor pobrkali sa srećom, a opet u atmosferi kraja pronalazite zavodljivo omamljujuću lepotu koja vas sprečava da napustite podijum, pa se klatite levo-desno, očekujući nešto iako ništa ne dolazi osim neizbežnog kraja žurke – e to je Mutis. A da omamljuje baš omamljuje; Mutis je pripovetke pisao raskošnom, kitnjasto lepom prozom, sa neskrivenim patosom i otežalim knjiškim svetonazorom o svetu – gotovo da su Konradove priče provučene kroz Šatobrijanovu dekorativnost, Selinovo oko za detalj i melanholični patos Miloša Crnjanskog.

A i Markes se pojavio glavom i brkovima u jednoj priči.

[David]

I didn't want to wait until I finished all seven hundred pages of this thing before I stuck my big toe into the waters of literary criticism. That's the ostensible reason that I'm beginning this review at the half-way mark. The real reason is that I can't be expected to remember my precious thoughts and feelings about the beginning of Maqroll three hundred fifty pages hence.

* * * * *

A wise old man (who shall not presently be named) once criticized The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll for its overabundant description, particularly of nature. And this is a valid (albeit taste-specific) criticism. Álvaro Mutis has met neither flora nor fauna that he didn't give a thorough once-over with his scrupulous descriptive powers. In general, I could do without all this stuff. I have an enthnocentric aversion to untamed wilderness and third world squalor alike, so to put it under an electron microscope and tease out its banal intricacies isn't really a selling point for me. If you want to read blocks of Thoreauvian exposition on jungles and rivers and thatch-roofed villages, then please consider this book a must-read.

The book, as published by NYRB in English translation by the superb Edith Grossman (who somewhat recently enlivened Don Quixote with a new translation), is actually a compilation of seven novellas about Maqroll the Lookout, an enigmatic wanderer who, seeking the meagerest subsistence, embarks upon various careers across the globe, some legal and some not. Mutis fashions Maqroll decidedly as a self-conscious 'free spirit' (which always sort of bothers me, as readers of my ramblings probably know) who goes out of his way to reject the palliative life of the conventional workaday bourgeois drone. This kind of thing usually gets my eyes rolling. (If you're just reacting to a kind of life, reflexively casting off all its trappings, you're as determined by it—albeit inversely—as the man who numbly aspires to it.)

At any rate, the two misgivings I just described surprisingly haven't done much to diminish my enjoyment of Maqroll so far. I've read the first three novellas and a half of the fourth. I don't think I'll be in the majority when I admit that the first (The Snow of the Admiral), a woozy, feverish journey down a treacherous river, is my favorite. Not all that much happens (substantively) in this novella—and in this way it's different from the others—but it is told directly from the perspective of Maqroll (through his found journals) as a kind of languorous reverie on life, death, and fate. Maqroll has hitched a ride on a boat on a presumably South American river toward some mysterious sawmills from which he hopes to make money transporting lumber back down river. It's pretty much a nonsensical get-rich scheme, and Maqroll knows it, but he's too far invested in the mis/adventure to give up. On the way up to and back from the sawmill he survives a few brushes with death, including a delirious bout with a disease that he contracts from having sex with a smelly native woman. (She smells so bad that he vomits immediately after the act. Not exactly romantic.) But the poetry of this novella lies not in the events or the descriptions of nature (which, as always, are plentiful), but in the resigned melancholy of Maqroll's voice as he embarks upon another futile and dangerous journey. A lot like life in general, of course.

The second novella (Ilona Comes with the Rain) is a more worldly tale, in which Maqroll encounters an old lover and 'business associate' in Panama City. Awaking from an interlude of indolence and fatigue, Maqroll and his partner Ilona decide to set up shop in Panama City. Their entrepreneurial inspiration, or rather Ilona's, is to establish a high-concept brothel in which the prostitutes will pose as flight attendants from major world airlines. It's a big success, until Ilona starts getting emotionally involved with one of the prostitutes.

The third novella (Un Bel Morir) finds Maqroll in a small desolate village somewhere implicated in a dangerous gun smuggling racket. He signs up to move some large crates by mule to a difficult-to-reach outpost (under the guise of railway construction materials) ignorant of the fact that he is really supplying rebels with explosives and weapons.

All in all, I really enjoy the stories, whose poetry transcends the appeal of their narratives alone. Again, you really do need to have a stomach for windy descriptions to tolerate this seven hundred page epic, but it's worth it so far... But stay tuned. I am nothing if not mercurial.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are among my favorites ever, anywhere. Maqroll the Gaviero ('the lookout') leads a life of tireless wandering, always seeking fortune, always failing to find it due to unforeseeable obstacles and unfortunate occurrences, most of which nearly destroy him. The constant stream of failures hardly seems to matter. It is Maqroll's spiritual destiny to move through the most remote and desolate spaces that this planet has to offer. Most often this involves amorous encounters with what can only be described as forces of nature in human form. His continual descent is dream-like, almost mystical; the spiritual malaise that he becomes increasingly immersed in seems to give him strength as it were a continual purgation and refinement along the lines of the dark night of St. John of the Cross.

The best literature writes itself, leaving the author baffled as to its sources. I can only imagine that, to Alvaro Mutis, Maqroll appears to be at least as real as himself.

[Pavle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Počeo sam da čitam ovih 7 novela letos, ali su mi se toliko svidele da sam rešio da ih ne pročitam sve odjednom, te sam tako čitao jednu po jednu, planirajući da razvučem na godinu dana, ali jedva uspeh na par meseci - previše me je vuklo.

Makrol je moreplovac, osmatrač, stoik, istoričar amater, ali je, pre svega ostalog, neuspešan. Neuspešan u svemu što počne, za zelen bor da se uhvati osušio bi se, ali uvek graciozan u porazu. On i još nekoliko preinteresantnih likova se susreću i razilaze u raznim kombinacijama kroz novele, ili su na moru ili za morem žude, piju pića u sumnjivim lučkim kafanama, ulaze u poslove sumnjivije od samih kafana (poslove koji, naravno, ne uspevaju).

Kroz čitanje se primećuje da je autor pesnik - rečenice zvuče ludo. Pomenute su verovatno sve luke svih mora ovog sveta, a sa njima i svi legalni i manje legalni poslovi kojima se neko može u tim lukama baviti.

Ne znam kako knjiga nije poznatija jer je fenomenalna. Volim, obožavam, preporučujem, mnogo želim da gledam filmove o Makrolu, mada ne umem da smislim ko bi mogao da ga dovoljno dobro glumi.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on just the title I'd expected a lighthearted comic picaresque tale of derring-do across the seven seas but this turned out to be something a little more sober.

Maqroll is a character who repeatedly gets involved in either borderline or explicitly illegal activities and they mostly don't work out. He's a world-weary character who reminded of Eddie Campbell character Bacchus



At least that's who I ended up picturing.

Despite some repetition as the stories went on this was a most enjoyable read

[Simon Robs · Rating 5 out of 5]

"All is a tale told, if not by an idiot, at least by a dreamer; but it is far from signifying nothing" - so says G. Santayana about nature/everything .... And John Berger speaking w/S. Sontag, "A story is always a rescuing operation."

This A. Mutis' "Maqroll el Gaviero" is a dreamer and a doer of high sea adventure not an idiot savant on a sappy horse chasing windmills signifying nothing; and all seven of el Gaviero's tall tales rescue his ghost assail at his side just beyond oblivion, waiting patiently for the fateful slipup to take him down below the ocean of memory's deep abide. La Vigie Maqroll, is indelible on my mind, another character speaking directly to me across time and page, knocking me about like waves in a storm, casting me ashore on a lonely island of myself to contemplate how a book can do so. It's marvelous; there are reviews which detail plot and character to be had here and elsewhere, I can do no better nor can I marshal a desire to do so; this book means too much to me to pick it and put it in summary, it must be experienced raw and unguided. My copy marked and scored will stare at me from its shelf spot and haunt me too like an avatar waiting for my return, and return I shall. Shalom, for now, Gaviero!

P.S. Not "throwing shade" (what is this latest jargon, oh well get w/times, eh) at you DQ or Sanch. or even you Roz., but it's just not apposite analogy to Maqroll; they are two distinct characters even if they have trudged some common ground, slayed some same demons. Sayin' ... adieu.

[nastya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of 7 loosely connected novellas about the titular Maqroll, a shadowy figure and mysterious adventurer. Some characters pop in and out of the novellas, but I almost certain you can start reading them in random order.
The first one, The Snow of the Admiral, felt strange and surreal, with a vibe of Apocalypse now (because humid suffocating jungles I suppose. I haven't read Heart of darkness).
But my favorites were the second, Ilona comes with the Rain, and the fourth one, The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call. I guess they spoke to the romantic and lover of supernatural within.
Big Flying Dutchman's vibes. And strangely they conjured The Night in Lisbon from my memory. All of them had a melancholic mood. These are the words I was writing down while reading: melancholy, broken heart, despair; vodka, smoke from cheap tobacco that repels mosquitoes; water, ships, ghosts.

But I am afraid I've lost my momentum on the 5th novella and noticed I started skimming a lot, I also feel a bit tired of Mutis' style. So I am stopping now, but who knows, perhaps one day I'll go on the one last adventure with Maqroll.

[Vuk Vuckovic]

Gotova prva novela: Admiralov sneg, 4+

Događaji na reci Šurando su uvek obavijeni nekim slutnjama, sumnjom i suptilnom čulnošću; radi se o događajima iz piščevog vremena, o savremenom svetu - hidroavionima, automatskom oružju, vojskama, špekulacijama i raznim dilovima i dilovanjima po lukama širom sveta a kojih se Makrol "Osmatrač" - to Osmatrač iz nadimka predstavlja onog osmatrača koji se penje na najviše jedro i sa njega posmatra pučinu i horizont, vidi daleko i najavljuje nove događaje - dok putuje rekom Šurando priseća.

U noveli se na neki način predstavlja i samo dva meseca puta uzvodno rekom Šurando, ali se u dodacima prikazuje i čitav njegov život, pa na čas deluje da je pisac u početku hteo da napiše samo ovu jednu novelu, a opet kada navodi likove Ilone ili Abdul Bašara deluje, pa čak i sam autor kaže, da bi o njima moglo više da se kaže na nekom drugom mestu.

Teško putovanje brodom kroz džunglu naravno mora da podseti na Konrada, a svi ti savremeni elementi i na Apokalipsu danas i Mladog Samjuela L. Džeksona (ipak Lorensa Fišburna kog pola sveta meša sa L Džeksonom u toj ulozi!), golobradog vojnika u svojoj prvoj ulozi.

[Terry Pearce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find this book very difficult to review, or even possibly to fully understand, but the way in which I fail to understand it is the way in which I fail to understand life: its complexity, its inconclusiveness, its openness to interpretation, its endless self-reference and connection and blurring of chronology and order and narrative, its cast of colourful characters that come and go and return again until they don't, its habit of nesting stories within stories within stories, and above all, its endless fascination, like a spell that is woven through your skull and bones and ventricles and spleen, leading you to ponder and echo and strive to make one statement, one meaning, when in fact there are as many as there are fish in the Amazon, or the Nile, or the Danube, as many meanings as there are words -- across all languages -- for home, or adventure, or the sadness when something long and winding and full of threads weaving in and out of each other ends, when mixed with the feeling that, really, it never does.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing...
I came into this book looking for the same peach-colored richness I secretly desire whenever I inadvisedly order a fruity mixed drink at a bar; as so often happens during said fruity-drink orderings, I got about halfway through and realized that I was neither drunk nor particularly satisfied by the bland mango-and-lemon-rind taste. Someone has been trying to sell me an atmosphere, but it's one that I enjoyed more in Conrad's Polish grog. Or Kipling's shirley temples.
Compared to books like 100 Years of Solitude, or 2666, this book feels diluted and extremely literary. I hate to post negative reviews, but I was expecting great things given NYRB's usual magpie-ish capacity for gemfinding. Go straight to Bolano, or back to Nostromo.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book for the armchair traveller with a metaphysical bent. It's a collection of seven novellas detailing the adventures of one Maqroll, easy-going adventurer and hard luck guy, as he gets into one ill-fated enterprise after another. The stories roam all over the globe, and are adorned with a surplus of naturalistic detail, but the whole book is coated with a fantastical mist. It reminded me of R. L. Stevenson (for its proferred joys of pure and effortless storytelling) with a touch of Borges (you can tell there's a labyrinthine mind behind the writing, though it's never as explicit as in Borges). A wonderful mine of literary pleasures.

[Caroline]

This is one of those books that many GR friends love, but I couldn't connect to it. Each 'adventure' seemed just like the others. I finally quit after Amirbar, leaving the last two unread.

Part of the problem is jamming 7 novels into one volume. The print is tiny and the pages are very long and dense.

One thing I liked is the very brief comment on 'Maqrol's' favorite books that comes after Amirbar. One of his five best companion books is the memoirs of the Prince de Ligne, a Belgian diplomat of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. I've read it and agree it's a rewarding account of these years.

[Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was probably the greatest thing I read last year. My personal desert island book.

[Spiros Γλύκας · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ο Μούτις ξελασπώνει συνήθως τον ηρωά του από όλες τις δύσκολες καταστάσεις στερώντας ίσως μια αγωνία στον αναγνώστη που τελικά προσαρμόζεται και δεν την αποζητά, εστιάζοντας περισσότερο στα γεγονότα, το περιβάλλον - άλλοτε ζοφερό και άλλοτε εξωτικό και τους πολυάριθμους χαρακτήρες με τις αναπάντεχες ζωές τους. Ο Maqroll el Gaviero, όπως τον συναντάμε στην γλώσσα του, είναι ένας σύγχρονος ήρωας περιπέτειας που φαίνεται όμως να κουβαλάει στις πλάτες του το πλούσιο παρελθόν μιας λογοτεχνίας που άνθιζε σε παλιότερες εποχές. Περισσότερα εδώ: https://spirosglykas.blogspot.com/202...

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer, I only got to page 400 and will read the other novellas at a later time. Preferably in deep winter, when I have more tolerance for long-winded descriptions of heat.

It's a man's book, IMHO. It is excellent writing if you can tolerate seven page descriptions of feral and carnal at a crack. The story telling is deep with contextual layers.

The first novella was the best so far. This is not a person I would enjoy as company or for companionship. My personal enjoyment in the reading diminished as I progressed. This is at least 4 star in the emotive and creative factors but my interest has plummeted to at least a distasteful bar I refuse to scurry under. So I leave it for a possible future with more tome tolerance.

[Rosana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read and reread this book many times. Mostly I now open it at random and let Alvaro Mutis’ prose carry me to magical places. But Mutis writing, as beautiful and effortless as it is, pales on the strength of the character he created. Maqroll is an anti-hero always in the margins of society, always traveling from port to port, meeting people in an underworld of brothels and bars. Maqroll’s quest is never defined, and never attainable. He is a voyager from another realm, someone lost in a dream.
I cannot recommend this book enough….

[Peter Crofts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never been able, since discovering Mutis' Maqroll, to explain exactly what it is about this series of novellas that I find so enjoyable. On this, my second reading, I was still completely absorbed in these tales within the first few pages.

Maqroll himself is a fascinating character, clearly assembled to achieve a symbolic meaning. He's a scholar of sorts, but he's a sailor. He's a sailor of sorts, who would much rather be roaming through the writings of the past. He's also more than a bit of a ladies man, though he's deeply erotic in nature, rather than simply randy. He looks to the past and idealizes brotherhood, though he's an aimless wanderer. In sum, he's estranged. Nothing new there, but what Mutis manages to do is to make him also sympathetic and likeable, as opposed to the bitter, solipsistic gasbags that tend to be the go to archetype for so many writers when they wish to portray the outsider. That's another way of describing him, as a charming outsider.

Looking at the other reviews I see most tend to list the same possible influences on Mutis, notably Conrad, but I think that is simply because of Maqroll's relationship to the sea, as well as his dealings with unsavory characters on the periphery of civilization. The two writers, in terms of tone, couldn't be further apart. One influence which really stood out for me, is Pessoa, particularly in the first of the novellas, presented as entries in the main character's diary. It feels very similar in its melancholy observations, as well as a feeling of claustrophobia that can develop in the reader from time to time, to "The Book of Disquiet". Sad, tragic events, experienced by a disillusioned modern. It sounds awful familiar, and its been done to death, but in Mutis' hands, he was a poet after all, we get something lush, prone to dreams and really quite unique.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There at the top of the highest mast, in the crow's nest where the lookout questions the horizon, all mystery vanishes in the flight of the curlews and gulls and the crack of the sails in the wind, and nothing is left standing in us."

It is only April and I may have just finished the best book I will read this year. At the risk of sounding trite, I could say that if you've ever wondered, like me and others, where are all the modern myths of weight and beauty and mystery, I'd say, look no farther than this. Maqroll, a.k.a Gaviero, "The Lookout" is your latter-day Odysseus. The blurbs compare it to Don Quixote, but the Man of La Mancha was tedious and self-limiting in his wanderings. Maqroll is more odyssean, boundless, funny, and never quite unlucky enough to be doomed, but lucky enough to escape doom when it presents itself.
This collects seven novels of Maqroll's meanderings through the 20th century and the fringes of both law and order and love. Maqroll/Gaivero is a seaman, pleasant conniver and sometime criminal, accompanied by his friends Ilona and Abdul Bashur, the dreamer of ships. His adventures range far and wide from Alaska to the depths of Amazonia.
An indescribable, woefully forgotten type of storytelling.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of seven novellas about a wanderer named Maqroll. Maqroll does a number of activities in a variety of countries over his life. He transports logs, runs a bar in the mountains, jointly operates a brothel, restores an old steamship, inadvertently smuggles arms, mines for gold, and forms friendships with a number of interesting characters like Ilona from Trieste and the likeable criminal, Abdul Babur. He even takes on the role of a substitute grandfather. Maqroll has many women friends, drinks lots, has a number of illnesses and gets on well with most of the people he meets.

The book is overly long. My NYBR copy is 700 pages. It’s a book that would be best appreciated by reading a novella a month, rather than all seven novellas within the space of a couple of weeks! The seven novellas were first published between 1986 and 1993.

[Franc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in mid-August on a marsh island on the Altamaha river delta in south Georgia, which is an appropriately tangled and malarial setting to read this feverish book.

Tasting notes:  hints of Conrad, subtle  Borgesian bouquet, noticeable Cormac tannins,  its long complex finish resonated most strongly of Werner Herzog’s diary of filming the incredible Fitzcaraldo.  (sample quotes from Herzog:

"The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything."

"Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness."

If you haven’t read Herzog’s book with the perfectly Maqrollian title, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo I recommend it, but even more, make sure you Les Blank’s making-of documentary, "The Burden of Dreams" It’s one of the best documentaries you will ever see.

More than anything else I’ve read lately, Maqroll has stayed with me, like a piece of meat stuck in that hollow in my back molar, which I keep ponderously probing, trying to get at it.

[Rick Slane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of book I have needed to take my mind off reality. It is translated by one of my favorite translators. She also translates Don Quixote.

[Ulysse · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing the first of the seven novellas published in this volume, I decided to stop for a while. I will come back to it eventually. I think I might be the first case of someone developing a tropical fever simply by dint of reading words.