Word: labyrinth
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...four quarters of Jerusalem's old city: the Christian, the Muslim, the Jewish and the Armenian. "Be bold, but not too bold," a professor of mine had told me. With his advice in mind I spent the first few hours of every morning trekking above and through the labyrinth-like quarters of the old city...
...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...
...cheeks, sketched lines under his eyes and erased the spontaneity from his grin. The face of Carlos Salinas de Gortari recalls Mexico's ubiquitous clay masks: one side smiles, free of trenchant thought; the other is a frieze of pained contemplation. That, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude 40 years ago, is typical of his countrymen: "His face is a mask, and so is his smile...
...southern and eastern hemispheres, Paz's work is a reminder that no part of the contemporary world is free of profound influences from another. His best-known poem, Sun Stone (1957), casts ancient Aztec symbolism in a modern mold. As a critic, he broke ground with The Labyrinth of Solitude, a study of Mexico as a New World nation improvising its future from indigenous traditions as well as revolutionary ideals from Europe and North America...