the general in his labyrinth [márquez]

My parents are ageing. I’ve been staying with them for the first time in a year. They are ok, but that trickster death is popping his head around the door, saying, bear me in mind, before he slips off somewhere else. Marquez’s novel is about the last days of the great revolutionary, Simon Bolivar, but it is also about the egalitarian process of dying, a process that makes all men equal. Marquez traces the General’s final voyage, ostensibly towards exile, but in practice towards his final end. 

At times the book feels like a prosaic read, riddled with details and flashbacks. The narrative, like the journey, is stop-start. It flows, then it comes to a halt, then it picks up again. It’s not a history book, but the writer clearly felt the need to educate his reader with pertinent facts; the country’s greatest living novelist writing about its founder and great patriot. Anyone who has travelled in South America knows the obsession with the continent’s founding fathers, venerated and elevated to mythic status. Young countries seeking to construct a mythic history. Marquez seeks to humanise this figure, bring him down to earth, inject his flaws into the narrative, although at times it feels like the writer struggles. There’s a hint of uncertainty in the way the writer documents Bolivar’s voracious sexual appetite, describing him like a rock star with groupies, before at the very end there’s a reference to his first and only wife who died soon after they got married. In fact, the contradictions and complexities of Bolivar’s history are never explored in any depth. His Damascene conversion to the cause of independence, something which Alexandra Wulf’s biography of Humbolt refers to, is ignored. The psychology of the liberator feels underworked, the text promising more than it delivers.  

Rather, the novelist seems most engaged in the aforementioned issue of the process of dying. If there is any way to bring a glorified historical character back down to human scale, it is to chart his weakness in the face of the one enemy he can never defeat. The book is a portrayal of Bolivar, but it’s also a portrayal of the stalking horse, death, who lies in wait on the bend of a river down which we are all headed.