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.

chronicle of a death foretold [márquez, tr gregory rabassa]

Having read the book in a day, which is not hard to, and having then been trapped in a mosquito net of sleeplessness, I pondered what Márquez’s novel was really about. Pondered and decided it had to do with the random stupidity of violence and of codes of violence. Márquez writes with the voice of one who is investigating a crime which took place in the past, at least twenty years ago. The fate of Santiago Nasser is conveyed with a detached tone. One that renders the violence, as it is conveyed twice towards the end of the book, all the more shocking. Márquez first offers a surgical description of the autopsy, in all its gory detail, and then repeats the account of the knife thrusts themselves when describing the murder within the book’s narrative. Each time, the violence jars, renting asunder the placid tone of the novel, just as the supposed act rent asunder the placid tone of the small Caribbean town where the murder occurred. The description brought to mind Bolaño’s chapter on the Killings in 2666. 

There is, no doubt, something masterly in the author’s handling of his material. At the same time, it’s perhaps hard to read without a smidgeon of concern for the way it presents its world as something out of the old testament. An approach to the presentation of ‘world’ literature that can also be seen in the work of many authors whose work has become successful in those parts of the world which generate revenue streams. Perhaps it might be said that the author is helping to construct the mythical bedrock of a still youthful country. That this work will indeed become, one day, part of the old testament of his nation’s literature. 

An alternative POV: The novel, which by the middle of the twentieth century had become a hideout for the middle classes, the literary classes, or else for tales of remarkable endeavour, is returned by Márquez to the people. He drags it back to the world of Chaucer or Lazarillo de Tormes: a space to recount the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. And in so doing he helped to democratise an art form that had become beached on the shore of the literati.