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jacob_wren's review
5.0
Álvaro Mutis writes:
I don’t know who’s worse, the marines or the smugglers. For years they’ve been fighting each other all along this part of the river, but in the end their methods are the same: they use cruelty without anger, in cold blood, but with a professional refinement and imagination that grow more and more terrifying. Their law is the law of conquest: whoever lives here is guilty, period. And both sides enforce the law on the spot and move onto something else. God help us.
And:
There is no cure for my reckless wandering, forever misguided and destructive, forever alien to my true vocation.
I don’t know who’s worse, the marines or the smugglers. For years they’ve been fighting each other all along this part of the river, but in the end their methods are the same: they use cruelty without anger, in cold blood, but with a professional refinement and imagination that grow more and more terrifying. Their law is the law of conquest: whoever lives here is guilty, period. And both sides enforce the law on the spot and move onto something else. God help us.
And:
There is no cure for my reckless wandering, forever misguided and destructive, forever alien to my true vocation.
babybearreads's review
5.0
It was just through coincidence that I read this book right after reading [b:The Savage Detectives|63033|The Savage Detectives|Roberto Bolaño|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1342651149s/63033.jpg|2503920] - Mutis, as a Latin American poet famous through the 60s and 70s, would have been one of the exact people that the main characters in Bolaño's work would have known and idolized. What a strange merging of fiction and reality!
This book floored me. It had the perfect blend of plot/characterization and deep meaning/philosophic contemplation that I like. You can easily tell that Mutis was a poet first; the descriptive language is simply wonderful. Each piece is a beautifully-woven story, often with many other stories intertwined. The whole vibe of the book to me fit perfectly with the Brazilian concept of 'saudade' - it's very nostalgic (as most storytelling is), but it's a melancholy nostalgia.
And finally, it struck me as so strange that by the end of the book, you know so much about Maqroll as if he was an intimate friend, yet you never really know much of the basics about him: where is he from? what time period does he live in? what does he look like?
Not many books manage to make me cry, but the end of the final story absolutely did. What a masterpiece by Mutis, way exceeded expectations!
This book floored me. It had the perfect blend of plot/characterization and deep meaning/philosophic contemplation that I like. You can easily tell that Mutis was a poet first; the descriptive language is simply wonderful. Each piece is a beautifully-woven story, often with many other stories intertwined. The whole vibe of the book to me fit perfectly with the Brazilian concept of 'saudade' - it's very nostalgic (as most storytelling is), but it's a melancholy nostalgia.
And finally, it struck me as so strange that by the end of the book, you know so much about Maqroll as if he was an intimate friend, yet you never really know much of the basics about him: where is he from? what time period does he live in? what does he look like?
Not many books manage to make me cry, but the end of the final story absolutely did. What a masterpiece by Mutis, way exceeded expectations!
thebobsphere's review
3.0
Alvaro's Maqroll adventures are a sort of cross between something Joseph Conrad would cook up crossed with Robin Hood. Like all collections in this vein some of the stories were great - the first one stuck out and a good number were so-so.
Personally the problem lay in the fact that everything was collected in one volume. If these had been sold separately, it would have been better.
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