Alvaro Mutis is a very great writer and what does not spoil one of my very dear friends. As he hasn't published any books for a few years, I thought I would pay him a little tribute through quotes from "The Last Stopover of the Tramp Steamer", this short novel is full of the grace that reading Alvaro Mutis provides. To re discover the Colombian writer.

P 39. The loudspeaker announced to us that the minor damage had already been regularized — why, I often ask myself, do they have to violate the language when they have doubts of a technical nature?

P 57. When one of these images returns with fierce intent to persist, there occurs what scholars call an epiphany. Experience that can be devastating, or simply confirm certain assurances that are more useful to continue living.

P 62. This is not strange. Sharing, even fleetingly, a landscape or a place from our childhood makes us feel like family.

P 70. Don't be fooled. We must always be prepared for these surprises, which usually ripen and spring to the surface without our having perceived the process. These are things that started a long time ago.

P 74. In my current task, I only put the body. It's not that I lost everything. It's that I lost the only thing worth betting against death.

P 75. We have been walking together for a very long time, from much further.

P 79. In truth, Jon Iturri has ceased to exist. Nothing can affect the shadow that roams the world under his name.

P115. But, finally we arrive in Europe with very ingenuous eyes. Many years ago our antiquity turned into a kind of fatigue, wear and tear, due to customs and ideas that no longer even serve us to live on our own land.

P 125. The only thing that has often saved me from the desire to die is to think that this image will disappear with me.

P135. Yes, now I drink vodka and have sex with a roumi, but every day I feel further from Europe, less interested in it, and I better understand my brothers who travel to Mecca without knowing how to read nor write, without knowing wine, resigned as they are to the chastisement of the desert.

P 150. That's when I started to worry. I know very well what the phrase “Don't worry about it” means in this country. ” It should be understood as: “If something happens to us, there is nothing to do, so there is no need to worry.”

P 155. On this occasion, as on the preceding ones, he avoided any formula that could be interpreted as self-compassion. There was, of course, not a shadow of pride in this. He did it out of simple modesty, through that trait that the French of the 18th century elegantly called nobility of heart.

p 156. The separation in Kingston could not be the last. All the things I hadn't said to her during our life together were piling up in my mind. They then seemed to me of little importance and almost useless; our gestures, our erotic relationship, our shared sympathies and phobias meant that words were too much. There they exerted their hold again, with imperious insistence.

P 159. It's just that given the natural fluidity of his writing, reading it aloud would be a bit like hearing his voice. I couldn't bear it.

P 159. The same story as always, finally, when you start from a distortion of reality and take your desires for indisputable truths.

P 160. She learned with me that people are the same all over the world, and that they are moved by the same petty passions, the same sordid interests, as ephemeral and similar in all latitudes.

P 163. Men, I thought, change so little, continue to be so themselves, that there has been only one love story since the dawn of time, which repeats itself ad infinitum , without losing its terrible simplicity, its irremediable misfortune.