FICTION

MAQROLL by Alvaro Mutis , translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman . ( Harper Collins: $20; 304 pp.) Picaresque heroes used to be stolid, unreflective types who fought and loved by instinct. Outside the plot, they didn’t exist. But now, a century after Conrad, we have Maqroll the Lookout, an adventurer so cerebral that his adventures are the least important thing about him. They are only symptoms of the existential disease that prevents him from living a normal life--or, more, charitably, of his membership in the “unconquerable solidarity of those who do not want the world as it is offered to them but as they propose to make it.”

In the first of these three sophisticated novellas by Alvaro Mutis, Maqroll ascends a Conradian jungle river for a get-rich scheme that he realizes from the outset is foolish. In the second, he and one of his longtime but intermittent lovers run a whorehouse in Panama City. In the third, he gets involved in a guerrilla war in South America.

More importantly, these stories tell of Maqroll’s efforts to refine the slag heap of his adventures--a mountain of petty and shady deals, voyages, illnesses, one-night stands, drinking bouts, run-ins with the authorities--into a few grains of gold: friendships, landscapes, and almost mystical moments when his refusal to conform to convention is rewarded by “tutelary gods” who lead him through life’s difficulties with “invisible but obvious strings.”