The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

By Alvaro Mutis
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Introduction by Francisco Goldman

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.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

And if you want to change your life - for the better - and have never read the Colombian novelist Álvaro 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

This tidy paperback volume, exactly seven hundred pages, 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 Sorrowful Countenance traversed the plains of Spain.
— John Updike, The New Yorker, January 13, 2003

Mutis is a dazzling stylist. His prose... renders scenes of often jarring violence and carnality with hypnotic elegance. Creating a hero with an explicit philosophical agenda who is neither a buffoon nor a surly bore is a tough trick to pull off. Mutis succeeds so triumphantly because he weds Maqroll's aphorisms to action, his states of mind to states of nature... In the end, this rough humanity entices us to follow Maqroll on his most hazardous and rewarding journey, the one he takes into his own muddled soul.
— Times

Recalls Joseph Conrad. And one can think of Maqroll himself not only as a Byronic figure but also a male counterpart of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna; both are spellbinding storytellers.
— Boston Globe

Though each of these entertaining and elegant novellas can stand on its own, the cumulative effect is of an epic novel. Mutis is a writer of the first order, and he is well served by Edith Grossman's translation. I admire his work very much and can only encourage others to read him.
— Oscar Hijuelos

The reader finishes this book in an exalted state, wanting the tales of the eponymous Maqroll never to end... Maqroll is an adventurer, a wanderer, going from one shady occupation to another. Mutis is a natural storyteller — one is reminded of Machado de Assis, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and perhaps Thomas Mann of Felix Krull. Let's hope we soon see more of his exquisite work.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

Mutis is one of the greatest writers of our time.
— Gabriel García Márquez

Also see:

The Invention of Morel By Adolfo Bioy Casares Translated from the Spanish by Ruth L.C. Simms Introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine Prologue by Jorge Luis Borges Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

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