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

by Álvaro Mutis, Francisco Goldman (Introduction), Edith Grossman (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780940322912
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	02/01/2002
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	720
Sales rank:	263,473
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Álvaro Mutis (1923-2013) was born in Bogotá, Colombia. As a child he lived in Brussels, returning to Bogotá to complete his education, and lived in Mexico from 1956 until his death. Mutis was the author of poetry, short stories, and novels. His first poems were published in 1948, his first short stories in 1978, and his first novella, The Snow of the Admiral—the initial volume of the Maqroll series—in 1986. He received many literary awards, including the Prix Medicis in 1989 and the 2002 Neustadt Prize for Literature.

Francisco Goldman is the author of four novels, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, The Divine Husband, the forthcoming Say Her Name, and one work of nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder.

Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of poetry and prose by leading contemporary Spanish-language writers, including Garbiel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and, of course, Álvaro Mutis. Her most recent translation is Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat and she is currently at work on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote of La Mancha.

What People are Saying About This

Oscar Hijuelos

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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

Three elegant, linked novellas fusing the dream-like imagery of Gabriel García Márquez with the dark undercurrents of Joseph Conrad.

San Diego Union Tribune

As the novellas move through time they have the cumulative effect of a single novel—one complicated by many stories and, within the stories, dreams, hallucinations and reflections, as Maqroll finds himself in every climate, in exotic places, amid characters of unpredictable, psychopathic violence...a fascinating and original work, rich in thought and action.

New York Times Book Review

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