Word: labyrinths
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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...
...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...
...GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
BELLE FICTION: In Praise of the Stepmother by Mario Vargas Llosa -- Would you believe an erotic family novel? The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- The autumn of Simon Bolivar. Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut -- Meditations of a Vietnam vet in 2001. Buffalo Girls by Larry McMurtry -- Calamity Jane, Bill Cody and Sitting Bull whoop it up. Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver -- Environmental catastrophe meets Native American mythology. The Final Club by Geoffrey Wolff -- Class warfare at Princeton during the 1950s. Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman -- Fictional characters caught up in the factual bombing of Move headquarters...