A review by terrypaulpearce
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis

5.0

I find this book very difficult to review, or even possibly to fully understand, but the way in which I fail to understand it is the way in which I fail to understand life: its complexity, its inconclusiveness, its openness to interpretation, its endless self-reference and connection and blurring of chronology and order and narrative, its cast of colourful characters that come and go and return again until they don't, its habit of nesting stories within stories within stories, and above all, its endless fascination, like a spell that is woven through your skull and bones and ventricles and spleen, leading you to ponder and echo and strive to make one statement, one meaning, when in fact there are as many as there are fish in the Amazon, or the Nile, or the Danube, as many meanings as there are words -- across all languages -- for home, or adventure, or the sadness when something long and winding and full of threads weaving in and out of each other ends, when mixed with the feeling that, really, it never does.