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. Here for the first time in English all
these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's
prize-winning translation.