About book The Adventures And Misadventures Of Maqroll (2002)
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) ***********************************************************************ILONA COMES WITH THE RAINIlona 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. ***********************************************************************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. ***********************************************************************THE TRAMP STEAMER’S LAST PORT OF CALLAlvaro 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.***********************************************************************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)***********************************************************************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».***********************************************************************TRIPTYCH ON SEA AND LANDHe 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)
¿Qué pasa, Gaviero? He can speak to sailors in ten different languages; to women, in fifteen. He has a lover in every port, and a rival in every other. He can rank every nation by its bartenders. He once had a boring day, just to see what it was like. He is Maqroll, the Gaviero--sailor, drifter, lover, criminal--and he is the most interesting man in the world. This is, of course, largely by design: as Francisco Goldman's fine introduction says, Alvaro Mutis started writing the Maqroll novellas in the 1980s in an attempt to recapture the spirit of the great picaresque adventure novels from those heady days when it was permissible for authors to write characters who have dramatic personal conflicts and could carry them outside of the kitchens and carports of super-modern suburban despair. Yes, even adventurous sailors get the blues, but if they're like Maqroll, their ennui plays out against a context that's actually, you know, fun.And in that regard, Mutis succeeds. Over the seven novellas constituting The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, our hero of ambiguous nationality gives valuable verdicts on: gun-running for rebel armies (don't do it); navigating treacherous jungle rivers (the river is symbolic); how to run a successful brothel (have a good gimmick); anal sex (pretty good); Germans (the most boring people in the world); the English (more boring than Germans); and purchasing boats (never go to a second location with a Colombian drug lord). Sex and danger abound, brothers in arms are thick as thieves, and a sketchy Filipino pimp with dwarfism and an eye-patch brandishes a dagger. Things happen in these novellas, and even though the first rule of every Maqroll story is that Maqroll must fail and The Establishment must win, getting there is always interesting.Of course there's more going on here than just dagger-drawing pimps. Picaresque novels from Cervantes to Chateaubriand and beyond have always had an element of tragedy; in any good adventure story, the Age of Adventures is always long past, and Maqroll is no exception. Mutis plays coy with exactly when these stories take place, but they all play out against the same nebulous, pre-digital, post-colonial backdrop, and the gist is clear: Maqroll and his comrades (the reckless romantic Abdul Bashur and classy sex-fiend Ilona Grabowska chief among them) are the last of a dying breed. Arrested in Vancouver for brawling, his only statement to the cops is "I am a Chouan, trapped in the twentieth century." Mutis himself exists within the pages, too, serving as a friend and long-suffering biographer to the Gaviero. The stories, supposedly complied from from documents, photographs, secondhand rumors, and drunken palavering with Maqroll himself, all unfold in the same sober, elegant, and unfussy prose style copped from the great 19th century adventure novelists. And even the stories narrated by Maqroll himself unfold with the same spirit of Mutismo, prone to philosophic digressions on History, Love, and the Soul. As a framing device, it has a charming, antiquated feel.That old-timey feel is in keeping with the book's strong desire to be a classic novel; not classic in the sense of quality, mind you (but it is mighty good!), but classic in tone, structure, and mood. Certainly in the latter and probably in the former, Mutis nails it.
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I didn't want to wait until I finished all seven hundred pages of this thing before I stuck my big toe into the waters of literary criticism. That's the ostensible reason that I'm beginning this review at the half-way mark. The real reason is that I can't be expected to remember my precious thoughts and feelings about the beginning of Maqroll three hundred fifty pages hence.* * * * *A wise old man (who shall not presently be named) once criticized The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll for its overabundant description, particularly of nature. And this is a valid (albeit taste-specific) criticism. Álvaro Mutis has met neither flora nor fauna that he didn't give a thorough once-over with his scrupulous descriptive powers. In general, I could do without all this stuff. I have an enthnocentric aversion to untamed wilderness and third world squalor alike, so to put it under an electron microscope and tease out its banal intricacies isn't really a selling point for me. If you want to read blocks of Thoreauvian exposition on jungles and rivers and thatch-roofed villages, then please consider this book a must-read. The book, as published by NYRB in English translation by the superb Edith Grossman (who somewhat recently enlivened Don Quixote with a new translation), is actually a compilation of seven novellas about Maqroll the Lookout, an enigmatic wanderer who, seeking the meagerest subsistence, embarks upon various careers across the globe, some legal and some not. Mutis fashions Maqroll decidedly as a self-conscious 'free spirit' (which always sort of bothers me, as readers of my ramblings probably know) who goes out of his way to reject the palliative life of the conventional workaday bourgeois drone. This kind of thing usually gets my eyes rolling. (If you're just reacting to a kind of life, reflexively casting off all its trappings, you're as determined by it—albeit inversely—as the man who numbly aspires to it.)At any rate, the two misgivings I just described surprisingly haven't done much to diminish my enjoyment of Maqroll so far. I've read the first three novellas and a half of the fourth. I don't think I'll be in the majority when I admit that the first (The Snow of the Admiral), a woozy, feverish journey down a treacherous river, is my favorite. Not all that much happens (substantively) in this novella—and in this way it's different from the others—but it is told directly from the perspective of Maqroll (through his found journals) as a kind of languorous reverie on life, death, and fate. Maqroll has hitched a ride on a boat on a presumably South American river toward some mysterious sawmills from which he hopes to make money transporting lumber back down river. It's pretty much a nonsensical get-rich scheme, and Maqroll knows it, but he's too far invested in the mis/adventure to give up. On the way up to and back from the sawmill he survives a few brushes with death, including a delirious bout with a disease that he contracts from having sex with a smelly native woman. (She smells so bad that he vomits immediately after the act. Not exactly romantic.) But the poetry of this novella lies not in the events or the descriptions of nature (which, as always, are plentiful), but in the resigned melancholy of Maqroll's voice as he embarks upon another futile and dangerous journey. A lot like life in general, of course.The second novella (Ilona Comes with the Rain) is a more worldly tale, in which Maqroll encounters an old lover and 'business associate' in Panama City. Awaking from an interlude of indolence and fatigue, Maqroll and his partner Ilona decide to set up shop in Panama City. Their entrepreneurial inspiration, or rather Ilona's, is to establish a high-concept brothel in which the prostitutes will pose as flight attendants from major world airlines. It's a big success, until Ilona starts getting emotionally involved with one of the prostitutes.The third novella (Un Bel Morir) finds Maqroll in a small desolate village somewhere implicated in a dangerous gun smuggling racket. He signs up to move some large crates by mule to a difficult-to-reach outpost (under the guise of railway construction materials) ignorant of the fact that he is really supplying rebels with explosives and weapons. All in all, I really enjoy the stories, whose poetry transcends the appeal of their narratives alone. Again, you really do need to have a stomach for windy descriptions to tolerate this seven hundred page epic, but it's worth it so far... But stay tuned. I am nothing if not mercurial.
—David
It is August, a warm sultry August. An implacable heat hangs like a pall over the town, sapping energy from the veins, filming the skin with moisture, leaching purpose and efficiency out of my days to leave them washed in a colourless languid laziness.I read. And for eight days I am transported in a flat-keeled barge up the Xurandó in search of an elusive and treacherous lumber factory; in a freighter painted a furious yellow that is impounded by a bank consortium and leaves me stranded in Panama City; on gruelling mule treks from La Plata up through the barrens to the Tambo; in a doomed tramp steamer from Helsinki to Costa Rica, Jamaica and San José de Amacuro; to gold mines in the Andes; to Marseilles, Tripoli, Alexandria and Istanbul, to La Rochelle, Saint-Malo, Southampton and Limassol. To Djakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Ecuador.It feels like a defection. I abandon my mundane existence where the week's excitement is remembering to put the wheelie bin out on the right day. I'm on a hallucinatory trip. Stars wheel above me, I taste the clean bracing shock of an icy vodka, smell the putrefaction of rotting greenery, hear the lapping of water against the boat, the roar of the ocean, the crack of a revolver shot. I have a strange, extraneous vision, nothing to do with the sea or the tropics: I see a green forested mountain slowly turn over, stretch out, stand up, and walk away. This whole set of stories keep shape-shifting, transforming into metaphysical meditation instead of adventurous tale of risk-taking subversion.Reading feels like betrayal. It feels like an assignment with a lover. For I would spend more time with Maqroll, if he would have me, for a while at least, for he is not a stayer (but we could have a good time). He is a man who people trust, although nothing is known of his background, family or nationality - how he came by a Cypriot passport is questionable at the very least. A man of integrity, although his undertakings are not always on the conventional side of legality. A man of warmth and loyal friendship. Multilingual. A reader, for chrissake. And one who sees women. Really sees women.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.So I must find my way back to the world of wheelie bins and reading the papers and watching the news, like grown-up people do. Here, in August, there are disturbing sea stories of people attempting the Mediterranean in vessels that are not seaworthy, there are people cast adrift and washed up on our shores, at our doors, wandering around on the browning grass outside the school gymnasium on the other side of the road where they are temporarily housed. Help is needed. Can I help? Interpreting perhaps, that's something I could do. But it's Arabic they need, or Croatian, do you speak Serbian at all? No? But they go swimming, you could translate the rules of the swimming pool into English for us. No pushing, no shoving, no horseplay. No diving in from the side. Walk, don't run. Welcome to Germany.
—·Karen·
This series of short novels suffers ever so slightly from diminishing returns until the last story blasts you in the face with awesome.Every page is infused with Mutis’ love of humanity and the tenuous but powerful connection between friends, while dripping with negative emotions regarding our species. There were a few times I came close to smiling while crying.Big recommendation for anyone who tried to read “Heart of Darkness” or finished and hated it. The first novella tells a very similar story to Conrad’s tiny tome, but it is far superior in every way and much more memorable. I would also recommend it for those of you who actually like “HoD” (give it up by the way, we all know you’re just trying to look cool).
—Aaron
