Word: garcias
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...GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
Putting last things first is an old storyteller's trick, and there isn't a trickier old storyteller than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A good example of his skill comes early in this new novel about the final days of Simon Bolivar, and it is worth quoting if only to demonstrate how a maestro establishes his theme...
...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...
Neither version is completely true. More to the point, neither is dramatically convincing. The febrile mind and 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...