I picked this up because it was mentioned in a couple of forgotten online comments somewhere as an unknown classic. I don't remember the context, I just remember the references to this.
Maqroll is a romanticized drifter. He wanders the world, often at sea, engaging in various escapades from the lurid to the horrific. Also known as the Gaviero (Spanish for a Lookout), he divides his time between wandering the seas as a freighter crewman and engaging in illegal activities on land. He is not completely immoral, nor completely amoral, but he has no problem with grift and crime, up to a point. He will pimp and con, but take care not to cause too much damage. He is not adverse to shady dealings and making use of others, but he is also loyal to his friends and those he loves. Along the way he is given to ruminations -- pensive half-laments about his compulsion to lead a life of wandering and discomfort. His scams are often undertaken seemingly out of boredom, or perhaps more accurately, anger at the world for boring him, for giving him no purpose.
Very much in the Latin American vein of long, florid descriptions and, frankly, superfluous detail. Mutis can easily write page-long paragraphs describing the wind through a field or the countenance of a stranger. You would think that would be anathema to my sensibilities, and it is, but over the years I have learned how to skim in the appropriate places. That is not technically a flaw in the book. That is a conflict with my personal sensibility. Mutis is a poet and has a tremendous command of language and seems to have met an equivalent talent in Edith Grossman as translator. Near as I can tell the stories are told as individual novellas out of time sequence. I could not construct a clear timeline in my head as I went along, but that may just be due to my skimming.
At 700 pages it can easily exhaust a reader. Although the characterizations are strong and the stories decently plotted, there is no one here to really like or sympathize with. There is an occasional hateful villain, but the protagonists just do not engender concern. They, and the tales about them, are interesting to a point, but not deeply affecting. There is more curiosity than connection.
Should you read the Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll? If you are an unseasoned reader, the answer is almost certainly no. Read Don Quixote instead. There are certainly rewards here for a more experienced reader. Mutis' command of words is deeply impressive. If you like authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you will be very comfortable with Mutis and likely be one of the people who deem this a classic. And, as I said, the stories are interesting. You kind of want to keep going to discover what happens, even if, when all is said and done, you don't really care.
