Word: bolivar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, The General in His Labyrinth, is about the last days of Simon Bolivar, but it can also be read as allegory. Having cast off the shackles of empire, tried to found a rudimentary democracy and earned the title of the Liberator, Bolivar dies in defeat. What he wants most is a single South American republic reaching from Caracas to Quito. But the passions of the revolution he led give way to those of separatism that he cannot control. His "golden dream of continental unity" becomes an embarrassing abstraction to his people, who begin following...
...Bolivar died in 1830 at age 47, probably from tuberculosis. The Nobel- prizewinning novelist only suggests the cause of death, allowing the disease to spread subtly into metaphor. As ex-President Bolivar passes through corrupting cities and pestilential villages on the way to retirement, his dream of "one nation, free and unified, from Mexico to Cape Horn," collapses as surely as his consumptive lungs. Fever inspires delirious memories of battlefield victories and bedroom intrigues. Ideals, glory, vitality and hope are overgrown by failures...
...what failures! Garcia Marquez, like so many modern Latin American writers, sees the continent as a vast and howling tragedy. Bolivar, a Venezuelan aristocrat educated in the liberalism of 18th century Europe, vainly tries to plant progressive ideas in a New World dominated by Spain, a nation bypassed by the Enlightenment...
Scarcely a page of The General is free from images of reaction, decay and despair. The strongest character in the book is Bolivar's cigar-smoking mistress, a typical Garcia Marquez macho woman. Not surprisingly, the novel did not sit well with many Latin Americans when it was published last year in its original Spanish. The author's antimythic portrait of Bolivar as a mixed- blood man of the Americas nursing his lost cause offended those who preferred the familiar Europeanized hero prancing on horseback...
...bodily functions of the famous dead are not off limits to a novelist, especially one of Garcia Marquez's talents. Yet in this novel his fabulist's imagination is overburdened by research. Historical names, dates and events frequently interrupt the mood that has been so carefully prepared to characterize Bolivar's last ride. True, Garcia Marquez unhorses a legend distorted by politics and patinaed by sentimentality, but Bolivar did a pretty good job of it himself. Schoolchildren may know him as the George Washington of South America, but a great many grownups remember Bolivar as the disillusioned man who said...