Álvaro Mutis

Vol. 2: Amirbar (1990), Abdul Bashur, soñador de navíos (1990), Tríptico de mar y tierra (1993)

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. 

"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

"..a newborn classic, a latter-day "Don Quixote" whose central persona, both amusingly shadowy and adamantly consistent, moves around the globe somewhat as the Knight of the Mournful Countenance traversed the plains of Spain." John Updike, The New Yorker, January 13, 2003

“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. I admire his work very much and can only encourage others to read him.” Oscar Hijuelos

“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

“Three elegant, linked novellas fusing the dream-like imagery of Gabriel García Márquez with the dark undercurrents of Joseph Conrad.” San Diego Union Tribune

“Mutis invents Maqroll el Gaviero like García Márquez invents Macondo, Onetti Santa María, Rulfo Comala. Maqroll is also a region of the imaginary, though created through a skillful assembly of small and large realities.” Mario Benedetti

'Álvaro Mutis y la nave que nos lleva', José Manuel Fajardo, Zenda, 12/04/2017

Vol. 1: La nieve del almirante (1986), Ilona llega con la lluvia (1988), Un bel morir (1988), La última escala del Tramp Steamer (1988)

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. 

"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

"..a newborn classic, a latter-day "Don Quixote" whose central persona, both amusingly shadowy and adamantly consistent, moves around the globe somewhat as the Knight of the Mournful Countenance traversed the plains of Spain." John Updike, The New Yorker, January 13, 2003

“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. I admire his work very much and can only encourage others to read him.” Oscar Hijuelos

“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

“Three elegant, linked novellas fusing the dream-like imagery of Gabriel García Márquez with the dark undercurrents of Joseph Conrad.” San Diego Union Tribune

“Mutis invents Maqroll el Gaviero like García Márquez invents Macondo, Onetti Santa María, Rulfo Comala. Maqroll is also a region of the imaginary, though created through a skillful assembly of small and large realities.” Mario Benedetti

'Álvaro Mutis y la nave que nos lleva', José Manuel Fajardo, Zenda, 12/04/2017

La mansión de Araucaíma es una gran casona tropical habitada por seis personajes que se refugian en la misma estableciendo seis realidades con sus propias reglas. Los seis personajes buscan desprenderse de su pasado, recuerdos reprimidos y frustraciones y a la vez se encuentran atrapados en sus temores y deseos.

Esta obra representa para Mutis la posibilidad de crear nuevos universos narrativos a partir de la experimentación con modelos literarios ya conocidos. En este caso, el objetivo del relato es recrear la temática misteriosa y violenta de la novela gótica inglesa del siglo XVIII, pero introduciendo cambios significativos en cuanto a la ubicación espaciotemporal de los hechos y a la forma de narrar.

Los Cuadernos del palacio negro, escritos desde la prisión mejicana de Lecumberri, ofrecen un testimonio escrito de una vivencia traumática. En el texto, Mutis recogió cinco cuadros significativos de su estancia durante quince meses en la cárcel mexicana de dicho nombre, cinco visiones que se alejan de la estructura tradicional de un diario así como de la supuesta relación de este con la realidad.

Con esta edición de esmerado diseño, RM recupera dos de las obras más representativas de la bibliografía de Álvaro Mutis y las publica para el goce de las nuevas generaciones.

Nobody has achieved anything like Álvaro Mutis in his prose, a genuine combination of the infusion of life, dandyism, intellectual acuity and the shadiest side of poetry.

The author began his career with the novellas included in this volume. The first one was Diario de Lecumberri, where he sifts through his experiences in the Mexican prison known as "El Palacio Negro" and makes them into a sad but luminous story about the human condition.

In La mansión de Araucaíma he proposes a gothic drama set on a country estate whose occupants unmask themselves to the rhythm of ferocious, sensual prose. With the final stories of La muerte del estratega, the Colombian author charts his thoughts on the simultaneous condition of life and death, while in Los textos de Alvar de Mattos, as well as in Intermedios, he plays a series of eloquent games with the threads of history.

The book concludes with Un rey mago en Pollensa, an unpublished story in which Mutis evokes, by way of a valediction and literary epilogue, a forgotten episode from the life of Maqroll the Gaviero.

The publishing houses Kultrum and Zalipoli pay tribute to Alvaro Mutis on the centenary of his birth with the publication of Nocturna, a compilation of his 'Nocturnos' poems, edited and introduced by Gonzalo García Barcha, and with enthusiastic support from the writer Mateo García Elizondo.

Throughout his life, Alvaro Mutis worked in public relations, was an itinerant salesman, wrote adventure novels, and was a poet of wanderings and the sea. He was once a prisoner in the Palacio Negro de Lecumberri for 'lyrical and gastronomic crimes.' He was a passionate lover of history and an unrepentant billiards player. 'A poem should be like a carom shot,' he once said, 'you hit the ball that's going to set things in motion, and it, in turn, hits the other two harmoniously, and that's a poem.'

In this volume, we collect the verses composed by Mutis between twilight and feverish insomnias, embracing the dark mantle that wrestles with the lamplight, conquering the day and enveloping everything. Behind that darkness, the contours of a landscape are revealed—sometimes dizzying, sometimes somber, but almost always accomplice and welcoming.

With the lucidity granted by the night, Mutis evokes in these pages the inhospitable winds, the rain over coffee plantations, the silence of a mirror that witnesses all intimacies, and the rivers that carry rusted ships, leaving a wake of vapor in their path. Saints, kings, and generals parade through these poems, and time marches on, conquering all, drawing us toward destiny and sweeping away the most glorious existence, except for the night, which always returns, ever-changing but identical to itself since the world's memory began.

One hundred years after Alvaro Mutis's birth, this volume reaches the hands of the reader, bearing witness to the powerful craft that earned him the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry and the Cervantes Prize. Above all, it brings us the vision of a man who turned his literature into a comfort for the lonely nights of those who know they are passing through this world. The poems compiled here are like those of a sailor navigating through darkness to reach the shores of dawn, or like those of a general waging, word by word, a battle with a predetermined outcome.

Álvaro Mutis is celebrated internationally as the author of the seven novellas, written between 1986 and 1993, that constitute the legendary and widely loved Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, is a wanderer on the face of the earth, always in pursuit of love and fortune, even as he knows that neither can nor will last. Few know, however, that Maqroll made his first appearance, and established his myth, not in prose but in poetry. Starting 1948, Mutis published several volumes of surrealist-tinged poetry, but with an unmistakable voice of his own, gaining the admiration of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, who would later call him “one of the greatest writers of our time.” Here a selection of Mutis’s haunting poems—invocations to a hidden god, private talismans of an outcast spirit.

"[...] Álvaro Mutis hasn't been very inclined to write for newspapers and magazines. I believe that when he has done so, it's been in response to the invitation of friendship. However, by adding some prefaces to books by poets and writers dear to him and the texts from the occasional art catalog, we've gathered a little over three hundred notes, without striving for exhaustiveness.

I fear we've excessively pruned this legacy once more to shape it into readings and other celebrations. Here are many texts that had not been collected in a book until now, and which their author was willing to let go, but we did not. Personally, I owe to these articles the discovery of many beloved writers (Eliseo Diego, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Anna Akhmatova, Miguel de Ferdinandy, Jorge E. Eielson, José Lins do Rego...).

Everything we do now for Álvaro Mutis and his work, even in this centenary of his birth, will be for us, his readers, if we wish to escape from this "macabre carnival," as he often called our time.

The poet and writer Mutis always needs the reader Mutis, of which there is something astonishing in this anthology with which we look at him once again from above the century."

S. M. D.

Narración para niños y niñas dedicada al escritor Augusto Monterroso, con ilustraciones de Alberto Celletti. El relato es un divertimento, con su tinte negro y dosis macabra, donde Álvaro Mutis traza la voz narrativa de un escritor que ante los niños lectores da fe de su filiación infantil por la antigua y legendaria historia del Flautista de Hammelin; pero además anuncia a los cuatro pestíferos vientos del recalentado planeta Tierra que tras ferviente y ardua investigación ha podido exhumar La verdadera historia del flautista de Hammelin.