Rolling the Dice : MAQROLL <i> By Alvaro Mutis; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins; $20; 289 pp.) </i>

The reader finishes this book in an exalted state, wanting the tales of the eponymous Maqroll never to end. Colombian-born Alvaro Mutis’s voice here is full of unpretentious wisdom and easy grace.

Maqroll is an adventurer, a wanderer, going from one shady occupation to another. In these three linked novellas, which really add up to a brilliant novel, Mutis takes us into the mind of Maqroll as he pursues his fated path.

World weary but compelled by playfulness and a capacity for pure joy, Maqroll makes the best of things, time and again, when all his plans go wrong. He has been telling himself that he has been disillusioned for years, but the pessimistic shrug never stops him from rolling the dice once more. There is a whole philosophy contained in this attitude, in the sophisticated but ultimately unjaded voice emerging from what purport to be scraps of a diary kept during his travels in exotic climes.

When we first meet him, he is on a slow boat heading upriver in an unnamed South American country. His goal is a mysterious factory or sawmill which no one will frankly discuss. All anyone ever says is, “You will see for yourself.” The journey goes on and on until it becomes an end in itself, a way of life. Maqroll ceases to care if he ever reaches a destination. He lies in his hammock dreaming, or reading about the murder centuries ago of the Duke of Orleans.

An Indian family comes aboard, and one night the woman visits his hammock while her husband has sex with a tall blond man in a hammock across the way, the Indian making the harsh cries of a tropical bird. Maqroll feels that his existence has become vegetative, out of his control. The Indians debark, and a military plane lands on the river. The soldiers arrest and take away the boat’s pilot and the tall blond traveler, who are never seen again.

Maqroll watches the landscape change. Someone commits suicide. The voyage comes to an unexpected end.

The second novella begins with Maqroll down and out in Panama City. For a while he sells stolen watches to tourists, but then the police become aware of him and he has to move to another part of town. Providentially, he runs into an old comrade in crime, Llona, and becomes her lover again. It is her idea to open a discreet whorehouse in which the prostitutes pose as stewardesses between flights. They wear slightly altered uniforms of the major airlines, and for a while the enterprise goes exceedingly well.

Maqroll begins to dislike the business, though, and is made uneasy when Llona becomes fascinated with an intelligent prostitute who is either genuinely haunted or simply insane. Larissa (a patently false name, Maqroll thinks) lives in the abandoned, run-aground wreck of a ship, where she believes that she is visited by two male ghosts, a soldier of the Napoleonic Wars, and a government official from medieval Venice, these incubi possessing her on alternate nights. The whole business comes to a sorry end.

Later, Maqroll finds himself in the port of La Plata, for some reason succumbing to the obviously dangerous scheme of a shifty character he doesn’t even like. In fact he can’t stand the man -- he’s a type Maqroll has seen many times before. But Maqroll is curious to see how it will all play out, even as in a way he already knows. It can only go wrong. Still, he takes the donkeys loaded with suspicious cargo up into the hills.

All through his adventures, Maqroll is constantly examining his experience; indeed his contemplation of the various situations is as entertaining and interesting as the adventures themselves. He sometimes thinks of a tombstone he once saw in the ruins overlooking Tripoli, the inscription of which read: “This was not where.”

Maqroll wonders, is it true that we forget most of what happens to us? Or rather, is not the forgotten or misremembered material transformed into a kind of unconscious seed, influencing how we will behave in different circumstances later on?

The amused eyes of Mutis’s jacket photo belong to a man who has been around for half a century or more and who has seen a great deal. (He moved from Colombia to Brussels as a child, and has resided in Mexico for many years,.) He’s a natural storyteller -- one is reminded of Machado de Assis, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and perhaps the Thomas Mann of “Felix Krull.” Let’s hope we soon see more of his exquisite work.