THE LONE SAILOR.(Alvaro Mutis, 'Maqroll el Gaviero' )(Cover Story)

A writer's time is hard to waste. The Bogota-born, Brussels-reared, Mexico City-dwelling poet and prose writer Alvaro Mutis, obliged to make a living, must have often rued the many hours he spent travelling to drab ports and shaking strange hands when he was Standard Oil's head of public relations in Colombia. Then, for twenty-three years in Mexico City, he worked the media mills as sales manager for the television divisions of several Hollywood film companies. And yet without this rambling career how could he have supplied the eerie wealth of maritime and dockside details, the delirious abundance of geographic and culinary specifics, that give fascination and global ...