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Loading... The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqrollby Álvaro MutisSeries: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (omnibus 1 - 7)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This is probably my favorite book of all time. Mutis' writing is glorious. His creation, Maqroll the Gaviero, is a tormented character, a hopeless romantic and perennial wanderer. There are books I love, and then there's Maqroll. If you've ever been subject to wanderlust, Maqroll will speak to you. (  ) whitrichardson | Nov 24, 2009 |  It was the first book I finished in 2009, and yet I was tempted to say that this would be the best book I would read this year. I feel certain that it will be a remarkable year indeed if I come across anything better than Álvaro Mutis's The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. This is not my first encounter with Mutis's protagonist; I met him first in an earlier collection of Mutis's Maqroll tales. New York Review Books, though, has, in this anthology, augmented those stories with others, and allowed Mutis to add what I take to be new material binding the various accounts together, as well as an excellent introduction by Francisco Goldman. If you have not had the pleasure of making Maqroll's acquaintance, don't wait. These are adventure stories for adults. Set in Majorca, Amazonia, the San Fernando Valley, Malaysia, and elsewhere, told with wit, panache, and profundity, they are what fiction should be—one of the things it should be—and too often is not. Maqroll can stand with any mythic hero one cares to name, but as he's a sailor it is hard to resist the notion that Mutis has given us another Odysseus, another Ulysses. dcozy | Sep 12, 2009 | In reading these tales, we plunge into a vividly imagined world and are delighted and frightened to make discoveries about our own. The excellent film, "Ilona llega con la lluvia" (directed by Sergio Cabrera) is based on one of Mutis' stories. RaviSankrit | Oct 15, 2007 | This is a very serious book, by a South American author who is well known by serious readers. If you need a thinking person's novel, this is the one for you to tackle. Mutis is called the second best writer in the world by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Do not be put off by its apparent length, first of all it is actually a series of connected novellas featuring Maqroll, the Watchman. Second, the first time you read it you will race through it as fast as any pot boiler. Carlos Fuentes said that when he started reading Mutis he wanted to quit writing because there was nothing else that could be said. As a great character, Maqroll belongs up on the shelf with Don Quiote, and Falstaff. In this one man lives every one of us. Mutis writes more than than the lines on his pages. He lived a very large life, in business with Standard Oil (Exxon) and with Columbia Pictures,as commericial director for South America, as an actor, as a diplomat, and even in jail for a 19 months in Mexico City. - He has met everyone, the bejeweled, the bereft, and the shoeless. They are all there in his prose. Even your mother ( )1  Stronghart | Sep 8, 2007 |  mmckay | Aug 13, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0940322919, Paperback)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.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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