Spanish Empresas y Tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero)[1] is a compilation of novellas by Colombian author Álvaro Mutis.
In the first novella, "The Snow of the Admiral", the narrator, browsing in a used book store, finds pages from Maqroll's diary describing an upriver barge journey to rumored sawmills for a dubious business proposition.
Their scheme is profitable, but one of their prostitutes, who lives in a beached boat and hallucinates military lovers from the Napoleonic era, lures Ilona into a fatal relationship.
In the third, "Un Bel Morir", Maqroll, living in La Plata, is hired by a shady individual of dubious nationality to transport crates of machinery and instruments, by mule train, up a crumbling trail to railroad engineers on a mountain ridge.
On a tugboat, he meets fellow passenger Jon Iturri, a former captain of the steamer, who states that the ship broke up and sank in the Orinoco River.
In "Amirbar", while in California recuperating from treatment for malaria, Maqroll tells friends an account of his time mining gold in Colombia.
The story ends with a letter from Maqroll describing his years as a sailor and officer on board the Danish ship Skive, and how he then traveled to Mallorca and settled in Pollença.
One memorable episode involves a plot by Maqroll and Bashur's friend and lover, Ilona Grabowska, to smuggle antique Persian carpets from Marseilles to Geneva.
Bashur fixates on the Thorn, and begins negotiations with its owner, a Colombian drug lord, but narrowly escapes with his life, and the ship is destroyed.
Other exploits include smuggling arms for Catalonian anarchists, running a Fagin-like band of boy pickpockets in Piraeus, and being robbed and narrowly escaping death in a Philippine brothel.
After many years, the two part company in Saint-Malo, with Jensen traveling to Bergen to live in the Seamen's Shelter and Maqroll eventually taking a job on a coastal steamer.
The New York Review of Books stated that 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.
"[5]Leonard Michaels, in describing the first three novellas, wrote in The New York Times that Each... is about high adventure and a period in the life of Maqroll..., a rootless man who knocks about the world from Siberia to Europe, Africa, Alaska and the Americas of the Caribbean.
"[6] In The New Yorker, John Updike wrote that the collection is a latter-day "Don Quixote" whose central persona, both amusingly shadowy and adamantly consistent, moves around the globe somewhat as the Knight of the Mournful Countenance traversed the plains of Spain.
"[7]Todd Grimson, in the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the first "three linked novellas... really add up to a brilliant novel..." and that "The reader finishes this book in an exalted state, wanting the tales of the eponymous Maqroll never to end.