The Adventures of Maqroll: Four Novellas

First met in the 1992 novel bearing his name, Maqroll, the nomadic, globe-hopping protagonist of these four inventive and hypnotic novellas, is a defiant wanderer living on the edge of society, a cynical misanthrope possessed of an innate core of goodness. With each new outlandish exploit, he seems to renegotiate his pact with fate or destiny, making of his life a daring existential adventure. In Amirbar, Maqroll digs for gold in a cursed, abandoned Peruvian mine and is nearly burned alive in his sleep by his lover and partner, Antonia, who goes mad. The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call charts the doomed love affair of 24-year-old Warda, the emancipated daughter of Lebanese ship-owner Abdul Bashur, and a 50-ish Basque sea captain whose tramp steamer sinks off Venezuela. Abdul Bashur, Dreamer of Ships follows the ship-owner's obsessive search for the perfect freighter, as well as his exploits with Maqroll, who helps him smuggle Persian carpets and transport Muslim refugees from the former Yugoslavia to Mecca. Triptych on Sea and Land is about the serene suicide of an eccentric Norwegian fisherman; a Madrid painter of angels and otherwordly realities; and Maqroll's year with the precocious son of Abdul, recently killed in a plane crash. Columbian-born Mutis, who lives in Mexico, dizzyingly evokes a cosmopolitan realm where continual change is the only constant. (Feb.)