Mutis, Alvaro. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Translated by Edith Grossman. Harper Collins, 1990.
Reason read: the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Columbia occurred in November of 1985. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll did not take place in Columbia, but Alvaro Mutis was born in Columbia.
Maqroll the Gaviero’s life is told in a series of four novellas:
- Amirbar (92 pages) – the time Maqroll spent mining for gold until his mining partner went crazy.
- Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call (59 pages) – the love affair between a tramp steamer captain and a woman named Warda. As an aside, I want to be Warda when I grow up…or at least have her style.
- Abdul Bashur, Dreamer of Ships (105 pages) – this story includes a scam involving imitation Turkish rugs.
- Triptych on Sea and Land (111 pages) – “Appointment in Bergen,” A True History of the Encounters and complicities of Maqroll the Gaviero and the painter Alejandro Obregon,” and “Jamil.”
It’s as if Maqroll is in the back corner of a dimly lit bar whispering his secrets. His companions share these adventures with us. The adventures take the reader all over the world.
Lines I liked, “My companion’s words held a conviction he could not fully express” (p 30), “This is how we forget: Our affairs, no matter how close to us, are made strange through the mimetic, deceptive, constant working of a precarious present” (p 111), “Human beings, I thought, change so little, and are so much what they are, that these had been only one love story since the beginning of time, endlessly repeated, never losing it’s terrible simplicity or it’s irremediable sorrow” (p 151).
Music: “El Relicano,” “Espana Cani,”
Author fact: Mutis is from Columbia.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Hail, Columbia!” (p 90).
~*LunaSea*~ 