Reason read: Reading 1001, 4th q 2023.
Well, I am glad to have finally read this book that has been on my virtual shelf since 2012. I was intimidated by the size of the book and the font size but overall I found it easier to read that I had anticipated. At times I was reminded of such books as Don Quixote. I also noted the mention of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The other is definitely a part of the story and in his way is showing how he developed this character. It is a collection of novellas but it does work to make them one novel. It is hinted that Maqroll has died but I don't think the author actually gave us details so like Sherlock Holmes he could be resurrected. Fate and death are strong themes of the book. I felt the male and female characters were treated equally. It will not be a book that I want to reread.

The book setting feels like it is in the past but it really isn't. It often is on boats or in ports or rivers. The character travels over the world. It explores friendship, romance and deception, and poverty. Gaviero is the ship’s lookout, the sailor tasked with sitting atop the masts scanning the horizon. Maqroll is always looking out on the future. He is surrounded by various friends that he loses through death. ( )

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer. Nietzsche

(Otherwise: Yes-Philosophy; otherwise, again, Amor Fati)







THE SNOW OF THE ADMIRAL

The Snow of Admiral is the diary of Maqroll’s journey on Xurando` river towards a sawmill.
Everything is real but could be otherwise: as Don Quixote and the windmill, or the quest for Dulcinea.

Metaphysical question, and some answer:
‘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.’ (page 45)

‘How many wrong turning in a labyrinth where we do everything we can to avoid the exit, how many surprises and then the tedium of learning they weren’t surprises at all, that everything that happens to us has the same face, exactly the same origin.’ (page 62)

‘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 the exemplary happiness, that surely never comes again.’ (page 17)

Eventually Maqroll comes to the sawmill:
‘And again, in the fading afternoon light, the enormous metal structure was surrounded by a golden halo that made it look unreal.’ (page 70)

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ILONA COMES WITH THE RAIN

Ilona comes with the rain, and goes with the fire.

‘Somewhere in his soul he bore the mark of the defeated that isolated them irremediably from other men.’ (page 105)

The adventures (and misadventures) of Maqroll this time are set in Panama City.
As always in Maqroll’s life, when the bottom is very close, he meets an old friend, Ilona: so Maqroll’s adventures start again.

Maqroll and Ilona start a business of ‘stewardesses’. After a while, of course, they become bored of this way of life and also another woman, Larissa appears to remind them about finitude of life.

Maqroll’s adventures are always mixed with the idea of humankind without borders, distances, as a world waiting for this character to start running its soul.

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UN BEL MORIR
(or A Beautiful Death)

Un bel morir tutta la vita onora (Francesco Petrarca)

‘I imagine a Country, a blurred, fogbound Country, an enchanted magical Country where I could live.
What Country, where? …
Not Mosul or Basra or Samarkand. Not Karlskrona or Abylund or Stockholm or Copenhagen. Not Kazan or Kanpur or Aleppo. Not in lacustrian Venice or chimerical Istanbul, not on the Ile-de-France or in Tours or Stratford-on Avon or Weimar or Yasnaia Poliana or in the baths of Algiers.’ (page 286)

The Gaviero takes lodging in La Plata and finds a room in the house of a blind woman. Under his room, the river: ‘The room resembled a cage suspended over the gently murmuring, tobacco-colored water …’ (page 193)
Quiet living is not for the Gaviero, so he is hired to transport supposed railway materials upriver. The job turns out to be very dangerous, and ‘His wide-open eyes were fixed on that nothingness, immediate and anonymous, …’ (page 294)

The Gaviero’s question, where ‘I could live?’, has only one answer: everywhere, and always with water (a river or the ocean) which faces and leads to another place.

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THE TRAMP STEAMER’S LAST PORT OF CALL

Alvaro Mutis tells about his ‘meetings’ with a dying tramp steamer, the Halcyon, all around the world.
‘The tramp steamer entered my field of vision as slowly as a wounded saurian. I could not believe my eyes. With the wondrous splendor of Saint Petersburg in the back ground, the poor ship intruded on the scene.’ (page 301)

The tramp steamer as a talking soul suggests to Alvaro Mutis about ‘the world of dreams and fantasy’.
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.’ (page 302)

The bill is presented to Alvaro Mutis in form of the Halcyon’s captain; who recounts his love affair with Warda, and the Halcyon.

Warda is the sister of Abdul Bashur, close friend of the Gaviero.
Abdul Bashur warns the Halcyon’s captain: ‘What you two (Warda and the captain) have will last as long as the Halcyon.‘ (page 349)

Alvaro Mutis needed to know Halcyon or the idyllic time of the past.

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AMIRBAR

'Not even the ocean could give back to me my vocation for dreaming with my eyes open; I used that up in Amirbar and received nothing in return.' (page 363)

Maqroll leaves the ocean environment to go into Colombian Andes, during the Gold Rush.
Maqroll's experience in Amirbar's mines will marks his life for ever.

'When I'm on land, I suffer a kind of restlessness, a frustrating sense of limitation verging on asphyxia. It disappears, though, as soon as I walk up the gangplank of the ship that will take me on one of those extraordinary voyages where life lies in wait like a hungry she-wolf.' (page 380)

'You must be wondering what appealed to me in mines so far from the sea. Well, it's very simple: it was a final attempt to find on land even a tiny portion of what I always receive from the ocean.' (page 380)

'We ate and went to bed. Before falling asleep, the word I had heard at the mine passed through my mind, and now I could make it out with absolute clarity. It was Amirbar. ... It came from the Arabic Al Emir Bahr, which tranlates as Chief of the Sea and is the origin of the word almirante, or admiral.' (page 408)

'Maqroll the Gaviero, without country or law, who submits to the ancients dice that roll for the amusement of the gods and the mockery of mortals.' (page 444-5)

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ABDUL BASHUR, DREAMER OF SHIPS

“We know that Abdul was always restless. He was never resigned to accepting what life offered in the way it was offered. Still, he was not moved by a genuine yearning for adventure or a longing for uncommon experiences. He was practical and methodical in his endless desire to modify the course of events, to amend what he always considered the unacceptable arbitrariness of a few people, the same ones for whose sake the rules and regulations governing everybody else’s behavior are made. His favorite phrase was ‘Why don’t we try this instead?’ and then he would propose the radical transgression against what had been presented to him as immutable law. (472-3)

Maqroll was a voracious reader especially of history and the memoirs of illustrious men, liking in this way to confirm his hopeless pessimism regarding the much vaunted human condition, concerning which he held a rather disillusioned and melancholy opinion. Abdul nor only never opened a book but did not understand what possible use such a thing could have in his life. (491)

As they passed the Thorn, Abdul stared at it. “Another ship slips through my fingers,” he thought. “What a strange curse pursues me. Or perhaps destiny insists on saving me from some deadly thing that lies hidden in these dinosaurs from another time.” (531)

As time passed, Abdul Bashur, without Ilona’s loving but subtle vigilance, tended more and more to follow the Gaviero, adopting his senseless wandering and his propensity for accepting fate without calculating the extent of its hidden designs. (538)

“Don’t worry, Abdul,” the Gaviero would console his friend. “These people understand nothing about Islam, and the worst of it is that their arrogant ignorance has not change since the Crusades. They always pay for it dearly in the end, but they can’t understand the warning and persist in their wrongheadedness. It’s hopeless. They’ll never change.” (541)

(Maqroll)
Let’s see if I remember: “A caravan doesn’t symbolize or represent anything. Our mistake is to think it’s going somewhere, leading somewhere. The caravan exhausts its meaning by merely moving from place to place. The animals in the caravan know this, but the camel drivers don’t. It will always be this way.” (567)
(Holzwege - Heidegger)


« desesperanza significa non cadere nella trappola dell’attesa illusoria di “qualcosa” e credere invece nella possibilità di effimere, probabili gioie, e quindi nell’amore, nell’amicizia, nella natura, negli animali...» Alvaro Mutis

«La loro (delle donne)verità del mondo all’uomo manca», diceva Mutis. E Maqroll: «La donna, come le piante, come le tempeste nella selva, come il fragore delle acque, si nutre dei più oscuri disegni celesti. È meglio saperlo fin da subito. In caso contrario, ci aspettano sorprese desolanti».

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TRIPTYCH ON SEA AND LAND


He alluded to these events with sibylline phrases, the most frequent was: “I’ve travelled at the edge of chasms compared to which death is a puppet show.” (579)

Now, the unsettling thing is that if you bring in a cat from another country and set it loose in the port of Istanbul, that same night the newcomer unhesitatingly follows the ritual path. This means that cats all over the world retain in their prodigious memories the plans of the noble capital of the Comnenos and the Paleologos. (610)

A poet from my country, who would have been a good friend of yours and an ideal companion in breaking open bottles of the densest alcohol in the most unbelievable taverns, used to say: ‘Ah, all those ignorant people always expressing their opinions!’ But that’s another story. (624)

“The Gaviero,” he said, “is a born anarchist who pretends not to know that about himself, or to ignore it. His vision of the human journey on earth is even more ascetic and bitter than the one he reveals in his ordinary dealings with people. The other day I heard him say something that astounded me: “The disappearance of our species would be a distinct relief for the universe. Soon after its extinction, its ominous history would be totally forgotten… (635)

“The Gaviero,” he said, “is like those crustaceans that have a shell hard as a rock to protect their delicate flesh. He hides that inner, sensitive area so carefully, it’s easy to think he doesn’t have one. Then come the surprises, and in his case they can be revelations.” (669)

“You remember in the diary I kept on the Xurando’ River, when I was looking for those damned sawmills that vanished into nightmare. I mention the moments in life when we think that the corner we’ve never turned, the woman we’ve never seen again, the road we left in order to follow another, the book we never finished, all merge to form another life, parallel to our own, which in a certain sense belongs to us too! (673)

What the boy had learned was astonishing. I had to tell him all over again how you dock at night in Port Swettenham and how you travel by land from there to Kuala Lumpur, what the schedule of the tides was at Saint-Malo, what information a whaler has to give to the harbor officials at Bergen, the speed at which you maintain the engines in order to enter the bay of Wigtown and anchor across from Withorn when you visit Alastair Reid, the three words you must say to have the locks opened at Harelbeke, which birds sit for the longest time on the masts of a sailing ship or the aerials of a freighter, the name of the sailor who carried the lifeless body of Captain Cook back to the ship, the days and occasions when it is not advisable to say Mass at sea, the brand of diesel engine that gives the best service, the number of times you must sound the bell when a body is buried at sea… (694)

As he so frequently said: “ 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.” (700)
( )

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….
( )

Where to begin? Where to end! Seven shorter "novels" are collected in this mighty volume featuring the restless, elusive and ultimately mysterious Maqroll, a sort of everyman in his absolute uniqueness and unknowableness, a subject of fascination to his "Boswell" -- a man both literary and practical and with a settled life. Maqroll is also not everyman in the extraordinary adventures and experiences he has had. Even his place of birth is unknown, as is the peculiar spelling of his name. (I decided he was descended from the Irish Wild Geese--exiles of the late 18th century's failed rebellion.) For he is somewhat like Odysseus, but one not having a home to return to. He is a man of ideals and a man for hire up for almost anything, a man full of dreams and a man with no allegiances to any country, a man of myriad languages and much erudition. He is a man with no country, loose in the world, us and not us--for are not we all in the same predicament? The most consistent aspects of Maqroll's personality are that he cannot keep money in his pocket and that once a friend, always a friend. When someone mentions a money-making scheme however, Maqroll cannot resist even when: "The presence of danger, unspecified but obvious, plunged him into an all too familiar state of mind: ennui, a weary tedium that invited him to admit defeat, to halt the passage of his days, for they were all marked by the kind of venture in which someone else always profited, took the initiative, forced him into the role of the innocent dupe who served other people's purposes without realizing it." My copy of Maqroll bristles with pink stickies. Marvelous bits of pith: of a friend he writes, ". . . one of his typical character traits was a professorial and very German need to explain everything with pointless precision, as if the rest of the human race needed his assistance to understand the world." Or on weather: "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 imaginations and call it weather." One of the fine amusements in this otherwise rather gloomy but strangely compelling and beautiful tale, is how Mutis introduces each new venture -- I wish I had marked them, but you begin to realize that even this 700 page volume doesn't begin to cover the varied enterprises, both criminal and not, Maqroll had been engaged in from Kuala Lumpur to Anchorage, from fishing for salmon to running a high class whorehouse in Panama City. And I haven't mentioned the romantic theme of the book, the tramp steamer, now almost extinct, replaced by the humongous container ships and vigilant customs patrols. (Have I said the book is set in the 50's and 60's and maybe into the 70's for all that it feels timeless?) A deeply romantic and lyrical tale, this is, written in formal, precise, and elegant prose. Quite amazing. It took me so long to read I can't quite give it five stars, but as a literary work, really, it deserves them. ****1/2 ( )

This New York Review Books edition contains seven linked novellas by the great Colombian poet and novelist Álvaro Mutis. I'll be posting a review of each novella as I move through the book. 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/1297736919?book_show_action=false&from...


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 ( )