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The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call (I)
I'm all set for the weekend with a bright new story to read: The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call by Alvaro Mutis, a respected author from Colombia.
Alvaro Mutis was born in Bogota, Colombia in 1923 but has lived in Mexico ever since 1956. He is both a writer and a poet. His most acclaimed work was another story in this book, The Snow of the Admiral. He has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, an important Spanish award ("the Nobel prize of the Spanish language literature"). Going through the list of the winners, I have to admit that I am not familiar with many of them (a new discovery path?).
A webpage about him in English here. A poem here. A great article in Bomb Magazine. And the greatest article here, by John Updike for The New Yorker. I sometimes wonder how do we know that some piece of writing is good, is quality objective or is it just a matter of taste and it can always be disputed? For some reason I believe John Updike's article proves that quality is not so much a matter of opinion: it is there or it isn't.
Anyway, I think I'm up to a good read.
Photo by Xavier González.