The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Alvaro Mutis (Author), Edith Grossman (Author), Francisco Goldman (Author)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: February 1, 2002

Maqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout) is one of the most alluring and memorable characters in the fiction of the last twenty-five years. His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute. Álvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. Here for the first time in English all these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"And if you want to change your life - for the better - and have never read the Colombian novelist Alvaro Mutis, you owe it to yourself to get acquainted with The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. A collection of seven novellas that can be read at a run or singly, it features the greatest rainbow-chaser since Quixote, but a lot sexier and ravenous for both learning and love, not to mention fantastical, doomed schemes to make a pile of loot." --Simon Schama, The Guardian

From the Inside Flap

"The tidy paperback volume, exactly seven hundred pages of smallish Trump Mediaeval, with a warm and informative introduction by Francisco Goldman, has the supple heft of a newborn classic, a latter-day "Don Quixote" whose central persona, both amusingly shadowy and adamantly consistent, moves around the globe somewhat as the Knight of the Mournful Countenance traversed the plains of Spain." --John Updike, THE NEW YORKER, January 13, 2003

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Product Details

• Paperback: 768 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics; First Edition edition (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940322919
• ISBN-13: 978-0940322912
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 1.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #324,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Adventure With the Lookout, August 17, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This may be the most beautifully written, wise, and fun book I have ever read. Maqroll is the perfect companion: he goes everywhere, knows many remarkable and delightful people in every spot, and speaks with wisdom, joy, and sadness all at once.
Each sentence is a gem: taken together, they create a world that transports the reader into a world of adventure, danger, love, friendship, and insight.
Imagine Cervantes mixed with Pynchon, with a little Groucho Marx thrown in: this is a work to savor and Maqroll is a wise and loving guide to a world of breath-taking beauty, where each day holds new treasures.
This is the closest thing to a perfect book I have come across. It is a true classic, as readers of Spanish literature have known for some years.

36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fatalist's Fantasia, October 4, 2006

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Yes, I agree with the other reviewers who have asseverated that this is a great book. But they don't seem to want to spell out why exactly it is a great novel, or, rather, series of picaresque adventures. - Perhaps they're simply tired due to the 700 page literary trek. - But, come now, a great novel because of tramp steamers and the sea? While the sea is certainly the element in which Maqroll feels most at home, there are, literally, hundreds of novels about the sea and the love of it (In particular, there's one author who's made himself into a multi-millionaire by churning out these books like a sausage-machine).

No, what makes this book great is the underlying fatalism of the work sweepingly on display in Maqroll and the several other characters, and in the finely wrought passages on what this life offers us, picaresque vagabond or not. Many comparisons have been made to Don Quixote. - But not in the right way - Maqroll is Don Quixote's Twentieth Century doppelganger, or spectral double: Spectral, as is the case with many doppelgangers in fiction, in that he is the Knight's opposite. Where Don Quixote is chaste, Maqroll is licentious, where Don Quixote is naïve, Maqroll is instinctively wise to the ways of the fallen world etc. etc. --- In literary terms, Don Quixote is a Romantic. Maqroll is Tragic.

I wonder, reading the other reviews, if the other readers may have just possibly skimmed over the philosophical passages that glower at one on every other page or so. It is these passages, these lyrical, defiant, essentially dark reflections that make this much more than any mere sea novel or rollicking picaresque.

For Example, for starters:

"...it's not worry I feel but weariness as I watch the approach of one more episode in the old, tired story of the men who try to beat life, the smart ones who think they know it all and die with a look of surprise on their faces: at the final moment they always see the truth - they never really understood anything, never held anything in their hands. An old story, old and boring." P.24

And again:

"He thought that the real tragedy of aging lay in the fact that the eternal boy still lives inside us, unaware of the passage of time. A boy whose secrets had been revealed with notable clarity when Maqroll withdrew to Aracuriare Canyon, and who claimed 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." P.261

And again, and again, and again...

Yes, there are mad illusory enterprises throughout the book- And jolly fun they are to read - But, like a requiem continually droning in the background, we are given, in Maqroll's reflections, that he is aware exactly how mad and illusory these enterprises are.

Fatalistic literature has never been popular, in America especially, which was founded on principles contrary to it, and where the recurrent mantra is, "You can be anything you want to be." This book shows, time and again, that you can't. It's no wonder Maqroll is enamoured of, among others, the Ancient Greeks.

Summing up, this is a great book because Mutis does the seemingly impossible here, giving us the pleasurable, lilting melodies of the sea yarn and adventure story, all the while beating the steady drumbeat of mortal doom.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dylan meets Neruda, June 7, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

READ THIS BOOK! If Dylan and Pablo Neruda collaborated, this would be the result. Lyrical, funny, heartbreaking stories set around the fringes of cities and backwater towns. Do these places even exist anymore? There is a homeric quality to the stories that transforms the flotsome and jetsome lives of the charaters. I cannot say it enought, READ THIS BOOK