Word: bolivares
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...General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The last months and days of Simon Bolivar, the brilliant and thwarted liberator of South America, are imaginatively reconstructed by the acknowledged master of magic realism. As the general flees from his progressive illness and ungrateful people, he trails, in his turbulent wake, a hyperactive tale of grandeur and disillusionment...
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 tells his closest aide. "No one loves us here." Terminally ill, fearful of assassination, mocked on the streets, Bolivar sets off on a mule toward self-imposed exile...
...will Estonia, Latvia, Georgia and the rest. But even if Gorbachev, like Bolivar, fails as a unifier, he too will be remembered above all as a liberator...
...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...