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.
| ||||||||||||
Browse the best books of summer including blockbusters, beach reads, and editors' picks in our Summer Reading Store. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
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
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format: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.
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.
46 of 55 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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 naďve, 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.
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 naďve, 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.
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format: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
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderful Book.
This is, thus far, the best book/collection of novels I've ever read!
This book seems to be a happy medium between swashbuckling adventure and some old man's boring,... Read more
This book seems to be a happy medium between swashbuckling adventure and some old man's boring,... Read more
Published 1 month ago by jd
3.0 out of 5 stars
not for the easily-bored
Judging by the majority of reviews, failure to be awed by this book is an admission that your tastes are plebeian and you're better off seeking reading material in the supermarket... Read more
Published 4 months ago by cordyceps
5.0 out of 5 stars
Live the life you could have led, through Maqroll
Maqroll 'the Gaviero' is one of the most quietly compelling and intriguing characters in all of literature. Read more
Published 5 months ago by [o]Mario
2.0 out of 5 stars
I just couldn't get into it.
Our "hero" was too much in his head--philosophic--with too little action or anything interesting going on in the first chapter or two, so I simply put the book down and never... Read more
Published 8 months ago by drmarvk
5.0 out of 5 stars
Melancholy, mysterious, slow-moving, yet gripping and unforgettable
This book by the great Colombian novelist and poet Alvaro Mutis, and translated by the wonderful Edith Grossman (author of WHY TRANSLATION MATTERS and one of the best translators... Read more
Published 20 months ago by R. B. Bernstein
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strange and Wonderful
A book like nothing else I have ever read, draws you into a reality that is universal and yet completely of itself.
Published on January 1, 2011 by M. Zimmerman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Easily in my top 10 novels of the last century.
Sure, the book can be taken as 7 novellas or read as a whole. As a single novel it contains some of the most wise, prophetic and beautiful passages I've ever read; at the same time... Read more
Published on March 13, 2010 by M. Haber
5.0 out of 5 stars
the unusual heft of it surprised me
Picking up this beautiful NYRB book, I was reminded of a quote from Borges' Book of Sand: "I examined it; the unusual heft of it surprised me". Read more
Published on November 11, 2009 by schadenfreude
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful Translation
I think that the translation of a novel (or any book for that matter) is almost as important as the production of the "original" production. Read more
Published on May 9, 2009 by Bjorn Sveinbjornsson
5.0 out of 5 stars
A painful but wonderful introspective exercise.
I find that I agree with all of the positive reviews, but indeed what most haunts me about Mutis is his deeply introspective writing style. Read more
Published on May 3, 2008 by A. M. Aponte Stefanccic
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Listmania!
|
|
