Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

It's no surprise that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has described Columbian writer, Alvaro Mutis (1923-), as "one of the greatest writers of our time." The seven tales of tenderness, sorrow, and foolishness collected in this 700-page book follow Mutis's Don Quixote-like protagonist, Maqroll the Gaviero (or Lookout), through seedy ports, deserts, Amazon jungles, and over Andean peaks, across rivers and seas, and from ancient cities to run-down Los Angeles. Along the way, readers discover Maqroll is a "madman," an "unrepetant vagabond," forever lost, like "a sailor who's been thrown off his ship" (pp. 218; 250). "There is no cure for my reckless wandering," he explains, "forever misguided and destructive, forever alien to my true vocation" (p. 37). He is also an experienced lover of women, who makes love, again and again, "with the slow, meticulous intesity of people who don't know what will happen tomorrow" (p. 343). Winner of the 2002 Neustadt Prize for World Literature, this slow-paced collection of entertaining adventures and misadventures is highly recommended.

G. Merritt

Friends of mine in Mexico City who know Marquez say that Marques worships Mutis. They're both Colombians living in Mexico City, but they're the comparison ends. Mutis to me is Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Jean-Louis Ferdinand Celine rolled into one. With a little Sartre for seasoning.

I really wish more of his work would be translated, but I enjoy Mutis so much I'm tempted to just bite the bullet and read his work in Spanish even though it would take me 20 times as long.

Maqroll and Bashur are two of the greatest literary characters to come by in a very long time.

Viva el Gaviero!!

It's very hard to put this book down. Mutis resembles no one writing today, his prose is immaculate and his stories indescribable. He is one of a kind. This is a treasure; one only wishes there were more.

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. I read the book in Spanish (my native language, btw) and the language is enthralling and personal... If you took away the background, most of Macqroll's fears and feelings are rather universal, and as you read the book (especially that WONDERFUL! first chapter) the book becomes an introspective exercise, made bearable simply because Mutis takes you there with the gentleness of his writing, the magic of the geographical settings (and their descriptions) and the company of the most human and flawed characters (Ilona being my personal favorite).

Alvaro Mutis wrote several superb short novels about the travels and trials of his creation, the wandering sailor Maqroll, gathered here in one volume in an excellent translation. Adventure, friendship, obsession, loyalty, bad judgment, and hilariously (sometimes tragically) desperate situations play out in obscure and exotic locations. "Maqroll" is an excellent companion for your own world travels.

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 of Spanish-language literature of our time) is actually a collection of seven novels (the last being in turn a collection of three stories) about the msyterious sailor known as Maqroll el Gaviero (the Lookout). Maqroll has no well-defined point of origin or national identity; he usually travels with either expired papers or with forged papers; he skates close to the law's edge and sometimes goes over the edge; and none of his ventures, whether romantic or business, ever seems to prosper. He views his life and the human beings around him with fatalistic serenity bordering on pessimism, finding solace in reading one or another obscure historical or biograp[hical work about some doomed souls in the European past. He has friends who care about him, some who join his dubious enterprises and some (like the author) who simply bear witness. Some of the novels are in Maqroll's first-person voice; others are narrated by Mutis as Maqroll's friend.

These are slow-paced, ruminative novels -- anyone looking for a thriller should find something else to read. Nonetheless, they are gripping and entertaining, and after you have finished reading them, they stay with you forever. Readers would be best advised to read one novel at a time, and let time pass from novel to novel. Mutis's works remind me of the more serious writings (not the "entertainments") of Graham Greene and the works of Joseph Conrad.

THE SNOW OF THE ADMIRAL, the first novel about Maqroll, is reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS in that the core of the novel is Maqroll's journey up a tropical river in pursuit of a goal that, though superficially clear and well-defined, becomes as mysterious and hopeless as the incidents that happen to him.

ILONA COMES WITH THE RAIN features a woman who is brainy, beautiful, sexually venturesome, occasionally larcenous, a fit match for Maqroll. She almost steals the novel from him (why not, given that she's the title character?), and yet.... This may have been my favorite among the novels collected here.

UN BEL MORIR (A Good or Beautiful Death) is a grim and sad book in which Maqroll yet again is pulled into a venture of questionable morality. Some (including Francisco Goldman, who wrote the introduction to this collection) say that it's the best book in the collection; I disagree, but not because UN BEL MORIR is a bad book -- far from it.

THE TRAMP STEAMER'S LAST PORT OF CALL manages to make a rusty tramp steamer as important a character in the book as Maqroll himself.

AMIRBAR is a tale reminiscent of THE SNOW OF THE ADMIRAL, except that it takes place nearly completely on land, with Maqroll engaging in an attempt to revive an old mine and falling under its spell.

ABDUL BASHUR, DREAMER OF SHIPS introduces us to a character who is mentioned in all the earlier books, Maqroll's closest and most trusted friend, Abdul Bashur, a Levantine who is obsessed with finding the perfect tramp steamer, yet who also is Maqroll's partner in may of his most ethically-questionable ventures.

TRIPTYCH ON SEA AND LAND, as noted, is actually a collection of three shorter pieces, which somehow hold together and have the effect of turning Maqroll in the light like a gem, illuminating some and now other facets of his character and personality.

I repeat: don't try to read these all at one go. Read them in order, but be prepared to read one novel and then lay the book aside for a while, and then return to it. That is the way that I read it, and you won't be disappointed.

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 the book is immensely readable. I am really speechless at the brilliance of this book. Mutis should be a household name in English-speaking countries. Thank you NYRB for the beautiful edition and thank you Edith Grossman for the wonderful translation.

Anyone interested in the innocence of reading a story for the sheer joy of experience, of seeing places you could never see as a 'student of the world', you will leave this book enriched and all the better for it.