is wonderful. Dense with historical incident, deft characterization, and the telling detail that is García Márquez's hallmark, It's the story of Simón Bolívarhe who liberated South America from Spanish colonial tyrannyand his retreat from public life just prior to his death.
The great trick of the novel is to make condensed passages of historical summary ring with life through the recollections of the dying General.
Predictably perhaps he obsessively catalogs his enemies' perfidies which on some level seem to be the disease which is killing him, though it's actually TB.
Such is the loyalty of the man's officers that just before his death he sends them off on various guerilla missions to undermine the governments of his enemies.
Despite the sure knowledge of his impending death he seeks to promote insurrection instead of harmony,
It is for this reason that John Lynch, one of Bolívar's biographers, detests the popular idea of the man as the "George Washington of South America.
" Truly, he was nothing of the kind, He allowed himself to be named Liberator and Dictator of Peru and through the Ocaña Convention named himself Bolivia's "president for life" with the ability to pass on the title.
He needlessly promulgated multiple contradictory edicts, He was against popular representative government, Though, paradoxically, he believed in a USstyle federalist union for South America, he was incapable of putting goals for the growth of inclusive democratic institutions above his petty enmities, as Washington did with such aplomb time after time.
N. B. Washington was a Virginia plantation owner who freed his slaves upon his death in, All U. S. slaves were freed by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in, See sitelinkSpeeches and Writings,, It was, however, when Bolivar manumitted the slaves of South America, including his own,
We also meet his longtime, forebearing lover, Manuela Sáenz, and find her to be as formidable a character as the General himself.
At one point some weeks after after the General and his retinue have traveled into exile on a cortege of barges down the Magdalena, she incites civil unrest back in Santa Fe de Bogata against his enemies:
In an attempt to make her life impossible, the Ministry of the Interior had asked her to turn over the General's archives she had in her care.
She refused and set in motion a campaign of provocations that drove the government mad, In the company of two of her warrior slavewomen manumitted she fomented scandals, distributed pamphlets glorifying the General, and erased charcoal slogans scrawled on public walls.
It was common knowledge that she entered barracks wearing the uniform of a colonel and was apt to take part in the soldiers' fiestas as in the officers' conspiracies.
The most serious rumor was that right under Urdaneta's nose she was promoting an armed rebellion to reestablish the absolute power of the General.
So a beautifully written if dense narrative that satisfies on multiple levels, Do read it. One final note, there's no magic realism here as in sitelinkThe Autumn of the Patriarch or sitelinkOne Hundred Years of Solitude.
But the narrative is
nonchronological which demands an attentive reader, This is no inflight or beach read! I found it deeply satisfying, In this book, Gabriel Garcia Marquez gives us his vision of an emblematic figure of modern South American history: Simon Bolivar, "El Libertador.
" Herald and hero of independence, a vigorous defender of Latin American unity, Simon Bolivar is a legend whose Nobel Prize in literature proposes, in a somewhat irreverent way, to tell the story of the last days the tone of "grandeur and decadence.
"
sitelinkThe General in His Labyrinth, it is, therefore, the account of the last trip, the flight when Bolivar resigned, and the various former rulers of Spain, instead of uniting as the Libertador would like, tear each other apart.
Weakened by many years of wars, travels, and palace intrigue, Bolivar is dying at onlyyears old, Gabriel Garcia Marquez depicts him as an older man who rambles and oscillates beyond like a pendulum between the memory of past glories and the bitterness of dying without achieving Latin American unity.
Therefore, this historical and glorified story constitutes an attempt to humanize an icon adored and undoubtedly unrecognized as a man, with his illusions and disillusions, weaknesses, and mood swings.
Under the pen of Garcia Marquez, Bolivar becomes a somewhat pathetic and endearing older man, This reading is also an awareness of our relationship to history and "great men," all of whom have known something without knowing who they were.
Beyond the historical narrative, this reflects the author subtly invites us and is central to appreciating the novel.
In The General in His Labyrinth, Márquez takes the glorious figure of Simón Bolívarthe man who led the South American peoples in the present states of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, and Bolivia to their freedom from the Spanish Empireand pours into the mould of his political imprint on the continent an endlessly humanising tribute.
Reimagining the least documented period of Bolívar's life, Márquez situates the liberator to reckon with his mortality and failures on his final journey down the river Magdalena.
Whereas the author's densely atmospheric and descriptive style the beauty of which Michael Bell once described with the phrase "psychological suppleness" lends the prose in this book moments of magical clarity, this is in fact a decidedly unmagical tale.
Bolívar here is a man swirling about the last dregs of hope: having renounced power he is set to leave the continent forever, held back at the same time by a reluctance to let goof power, of his dream of a united South American republic, one he would never fulfil, and at last of life.
In fact, Márquez urges one to read the General's body so ravaged by tuberculosis that most people doubt he will survive to his exile in Europe as intimately connected with this imagined nation.
The spectre of mortality which looms large over every detail in this fictionalised account thus points not only at Bolívar's impending death, but also at the country he fought for disintegrating before his eyes.
This connection sees its clearest example in the manner in which the perfidies of his enemies are described and catalogued, as if it is these betrayals, and not the disease, that torment him to his death.
The writer undertook copious research for two years in order to fill out the characters in his fictionalisation, which is evident in the detail and veracity with which he describes the complex and often contradictory figure that the General was, including his ways with women, his often contradictory nationalist ideals, and his relationship with his slave and closest personal aide, José Palacios.
Sketch of Simón Bolívar at age, made from life and nearing his death by José María Espinosa,
Though the Bolívar that Márquez sketches out for us is frail and dying, he nevertheless exudes a dignified charm, and the memories of his youthful conquests weave in and out of the narrative like threads snagging in time.
All that being said, I did find myself struggling with this book often and took an inordinately long time ten days! to finish it notentirelypleasant experiences I attribute largely to my lack of familiarity with the history of Latin America.
For fans of Márquez who are similarly undereducated on these topics, this may prove to be a magical read in the same way as sitelinkChronicle of a Death ForetoldThe General in His Labyrinth has all of the author's humour and narrative charms with hardly a smidgen of the magic realism that is his hallmark.
While it will go down as the least impressive Márquez I've read so far, it is still an astounding book.
I particularly enjoyed the last chapter and the raw lucidity with which it articulates the tension at the heart of this biographical fiction, using the General's own last words:
He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line.,
The rest was darkness.
'Damn it,' he sighed,
'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth