Alvaro Mutis

These four novellas are unified by the characters Maqroll and the Bashur family, and by the narrator, identified only as "I" but presumably Mutis himself. In Amirbar Maqroll finds gold in an abandoned mine in the South American jungle and is nearly buried alive by a woman companion. The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call is the haunting love story of Warda, twenty-three, the rebellious younger sister of Abdul Bashur, and Jon Iturri, the fiftyish captain of the tramp steamer Alcion, which lasts until the ship is wrecked and destroyed in Venezuela. All his life Abdul Bashur, a Lebanese shipowner, dreamed of finding the perfect ship, and the novella named for him chronicles his life and friendship with Maqroll and their shady schemes, from selling rare Oriental rugs to transporting Muslim pilgrims from the former Yugoslavia to Mecca. Triptych tells of three incidents in the Maqroll cycle - the suicide of an old Norwegian friend, Maqroll's encounters with a famous painter, and the culminating, poignant story of Maqroll's year with four-year-old Jamil, the son of Abdul Bashur, recently killed in a plane crash.

Haunting, sensuous, and romantic, these three novellas feature an original and charismatic hero called Maqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout)--adventurer, sailor, intense and devoted but temporary lover, loyal friend, student of Saint Francis, and entrepreneur of dubious schemes.

"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.". "Alvaro Mutis's seven 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 stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation."--BOOK JACKET.

"Esta selección abarca desde los primeros poemas de los años cuarenta hasta Un homenaje y siete nocturnos (1986) e incluye tres peomas dispersos. El conjunto capta a la perfección los rasgos que definen la poética de Mutis: la convivencia de lo lírico y lo narrativo; la deseperanza que resuman sus personajes errantes y sin centro; una cosmovisión de raigambre expresionista, en la que el espacio se tiñe de dicha desesperanza y se torna asfixiante. Acompaña a esta edición el ensayo de Octavio Paz incluido en Puertas al campo"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.