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The Twilight of the General
June 3, 2008 in book reviews
The General in His Labyrinth is Gabriel García Marquez’s fictionalized chronicle of Simon Bolívar‘s farewell tour through a post-”liberated” South America, which he took shortly before his death. Reading this book begs the question: Has Marquez written a fictional history or a faithful rendering of history as it happens?
Let me first emphasize that The General is not Marquez for Beginners. If you haven’t already read One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, then you’re short-changing yourself by reading this book. The General is for the Marquez completist, or maybe for someone well-versed in and enthusiastic about South American history. Unlike those novels in which Marquez conjures up a self-contained family history, The General drapes itself over the sharp contours of historical fact. Though you’d think a little factual underpinning would only serve to heighten the experience of reading about Bolívar’s last days, I actually found it to detract from the drama. The emotional power of The General derives from Marquez’s description of Bolívar’s withdrawal from friends, lovers, and his legacy. When Bolívar declares, “I am not myself,” it’s as if he’s unhinged his former, recognized self from his current, deteriorating self. The past becomes someone else, something to be scrutinized and assessed through the lens of old age.
This book would be an appropriate subject for Edward Said’s book of criticism on artwork created late in life, On Late Style. As Gabriel García Marquez ages, so, too, do his protagonists. (The rumored new novel from Marquez undoubtedly features a cast of nonagenarians.) The General in His Labyrinth is suffused with a feeling of twilight; it’s a sustained goodbye to a continent. And because this is Marquez, the whole tour is redolent with an elegiac beauty.
I don’t want to commit the sin of reading the author through his protagonist, but it is impossible not to read many of the General’s edicts as issued through Marquez’s pen. In fact, I consider The General to be the most personal novel of Marquez’s that I’ve read, especially in light of confessions like this: “[H]e could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most.” It’s tempting to think of magic realism as a coping mechanism for old age. And then we have wry asides like this one: “There’s nothing more dangerous than a written memoir.” Perhaps this is why we’ve never received Volume II of Marquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale? When Bolívar bemoans “the fact is there are fewer and fewer good books,” it reads as much like authorial comment as like the fictional criticism of a political leader.
The General in His Labyrinth is also a defense of a life and a continent. Marquez writes of the fractured South American identity:
“The damn problem is that we stopped being Spaniards and then we went here and there and everywhere in countries that change their names and governments so much from one day to the next we don’t know where the hell we come from.”
It’s a spurious explanation for the continent’s lack of cohesion, but still a clever summation of post-colonial confusion. And of the Western perspective of South American politics:
“Don’t attempt to teach us how we should be, don’t attempt to make us just like you, don’t try to have us do well in twenty years what you have done so badly in two thousand…Damn it, please let us have our Middle Ages in peace!”
Bolívar’s exasperated outbursts are as valid now as they were then.
So where does that leave The General? Unfortunately, the book itself is not as compelling as its potential insights into Marquez and his beliefs. In the end, The General in His Labyrinth offers us the same narrative that we can find in Marquez’s other, better titles: a man near the end of his days reconciles his love for an abstraction.
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i want a lot of pictures of simon bolivar as a baby or a child. i also want alot of info on him and books on him that i can read. im really intrested to know about him.
how can i get books on this man?