Relatos de mar y tierra

Relatos de mar y tierra

Short stories and novellas , 2000

DEBOLSILLO

Pages: 240

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The book concludes with Un rey mago en Pollensa, an unpublished story in which Mutis evokes, by way of a valediction and literary epilogue, a forgotten episode from the life of Maqroll the Gaviero.