The General In His Labyrinth (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
I always feel a twinge of pity when someone tells me, “I don’t read for pleasure any more” or “I only read non-fiction.” Most of the pity is sympathy for the fact that, in today’s busy world, we just don’t have the time. Whenever someone expresses awe at the number of books I read in a year and asks me how I do it, I say, truthfully, that I make the time to read, just as I make the time to write these reviews. So I realize that the act of reading is itself a commitment, an investment of time and energy, and it’s a shame we don’t have more opportunities for it.Still.The rest of the pity goes towards the smaller worlds in which people who don’t read fiction must live. Non-fiction is great. I love a good biography, history, or science text. But let’s be honest here: I would never, ever pick up a non-fiction book about the history of South America. It’s just not a topic that it would occur to me to read about, let alone something I’m interested in reading about as non-fiction. Even if someone gave me such a book as a gift, I’d probably struggle through it. I’d likely find it dry, confusing, difficult to relate to. The sad truth is that I learned absolutely nothing about South American history in school. While we focused on the founding of Canada and the various World Wars, South America itself was a big question mark on the map, dangling off the end of Mexico.Hand me a novel set in nineteenth-century South America, though, and then we’re on more solid ground. Therein lies the power of fiction: it can be a tool of education as well as entertainment. It can create empathy for characters whose lives are incredibly different from our own. And it also exposes us to facts and ideas that we would never be interested in reading as non-fiction items. I don’t want to read a biography of Símon Bolivar. I did read a fictional account of his last days as he journeyed into exile.So with The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez contributes to the closing of another massive gap in my knowledge of world history. Through this sliver of story I have glimpsed the genesis of the countries of South America and the remarkable role Bolivar played in their founding. I’ve also enjoyed a slow and meditative look at the mind and last days of a man of many deeds and many contradictions.García Márquez refers to Bolivar throughout as only “the General". He could just as easily have chosen “President” or “Liberator", so in choosing the first mode of address, he emphasizes Bolivar’s military past. This is a man who is not a politician so much as a warrior and a strategist. His vision is that of the conqueror and the liberator; peace, for Bolivar, was not ever really on the table. This theme reverberates through the novel, which does not follow a straightforward chronological path; in both the past and the present, chaos seems to stalk the General at every turn.His past is a patchwork of unrest and rebellion. Even after wresting control of South America from its absentee Spanish overlords, the General finds that pacifying his own people is itself a task of a lifetime. His dream of a unified South America recedes ever into the distance, and though every government affords him the highest honours, he is regularly the subject of assassination attempts. This mirrors the present, which has an illusion of restfulness and closure, at least within the General’s inner circle. Without, García Márquez depicts almost comical efforts to keep the General within a cocoon of misinformation: guards and servants conspire to keep him ignorant of the social unrest and protests that dog him from the start of the journey to its end. At every town, those in charge meet the General with open arms.Of course, what makes this journey so special is the finality of it: the General is dying. Tuberculosis has ravaged his body to the point where many doubt he will survive to see Europe and exile. This spectre of mortality looms over every event of the book, as García Márquez constantly reminds us through his regular descriptions of the various ways the General’s body betrays him. For a man who stood against Spain and ruled multiple countries, the end is just as ordinary as a peasant on the streets. The General’s body slowly deteriorates, and with it so too does his sense of agency. He clings, almost desperately, to the privilege of shaving himself in the morning, despite failing eyesight and a shaking hand.With the end of the General, so too there is the sense of an ending to the situation in South America. As long as the General travels down the river, it feels like all of South America is paused. Things are happening, yes, but they are distant and indistinct events related back by hearsay and rumour. Nevertheless, this constant murmur creates a tension that will only dissolve upon the General’s death: only then can everything rush into motion, old alliances discarded and new ones brokered along lines that have been visible for months.García Márquez’s style is relaxing. Much like Jhumpa Lahiri in The Lowland, his reliance on artful descriptions over dialogue draws the reader into the ebb and flow of the narrative. It’s very easy to curl up with this book next to a fire and with a cup of tea and lose oneself in the General’s final journey into the annals of history. This isn’t a story in the traditional sense where things happen, one after the other, where a protagonist and antagonist do battle to resolve a conflict. Instead, it is an account, a detailed look at the last days of someone who made such a big impact on the world. García Márquez spends little time attempting to rationalize the General’s actions or intent or even trying to get inside the General’s head. As the General’s manservant, Jose Palacios, would say: “only my master knows what my master is thinking.”And so, this is a restful book. It’s a book that invites contemplation and consideration, though it requires neither. It’s a book that offers few answers, preferring instead to offer up images and ideas, leaving you to come up with the questions yourself. It educates, but indirectly, and as discreetly as possible. It’s the perfect blend of history and literature.
'The General In His Labyrinth' is Marquez's fictional reconstruction of Simon Bolivar's, the liberator of South America from the Spanish, last days. Being an Indian I am not 100% sure of the historical accuracy in the novel, but people expecting a hardcore historical novel may be disappointed as Marquez weaves his own brand of magic interspersing events and actions that you would not expect in a novel of this genre while maintaining the relevance of the genre also. After all, this is a person who created an entirely fictional village 'Macondo' and in someways made it the center of the physical Latin American world. So, being an outsider I will just give short introduction to this novel, hoping to persuade those who read this post to go out and grab the novel too :)Simon Bolivar was a one page/paragraph note to me in my ninth standard history class. Just knew him as the liberator of the entire Latin American continent. So generally, in such cases we unconsciously form a mental image of such persons. But all those is shattered here. As the novel begins, Bolivar is person who is seeing his dream of a united Latin America crumbling before his own eyes, his own authority diminished greatly and even hated by many of the countries/people he helped in their liberation. He is also a person who is holding on his last illusion that he may somehow again be accepted by the people and powers that be. But that is not the case and Bolivar finally decides to leave for Europe. The novel then charts his last days through the journey that he undertakes.The Bolivar we come to know through the journey and flashbacks is not a squeaky white person, but a person with his own failings and faults. He is obstinate, a bad loser even in card games, someone who uses cologne so much that opponents even accuse him wasting money on it, maybe even a person who aspired to be the complete dictator for the entire South America and we even think that maybe the people were justified in turning against him. But he is also a leader who is so careless with money and has lost his entire inherited fortune and whatever he has earned. In fact he cannot even afford a horse to travel and rides a mule and one who cannot afford a first class travel in a barge and has to travel third class, this a person who liberated an entire continent. He is now reduced to talking about a mine which he says is his and is expecting money from it. Other than him, no one even knows if it exists or not. As the travel progresses, we get to see a nearly completely broken man, who rants and raves against his enemies but somehow seems to have lost the drive that led him to be such a great general in the first place. He is almost like a petulant child who refuses to accept things even if it is right in front of him, hoping against hope that goods things would happen. He sees the complete destruction of what he built and is powerless to stop it. Persons he exiled are returning to the continent even as he is preparing to leave it. People in a town throw dirt at him and humiliate him. They write slogans on the wall humiliating him. The death of a close associate who is assassinated seems to come as the final blow to him and he fully gives up all will to live. The novel ends with the general having a moment of epiphany which is one of the most evocative passages I have ever read (will give that below).I felt some parallels between the General and Colonel Aureliano Buendía (Hundred years of Solitude) . Both of them start off with noble intentions, get sucked into doing things that themselves fought against in the first place, are nearly forgotten by the same people they helped and are forever doomed to a life in solitude and labyrinth in the midst of all the people surrounding them.The following passage right at the end of then novel itself should be enough for someone to read it. This is my most favorite of all Marquez books, much much more than his more acclaimed works.//He examined the room with the clairvoyance of his last days and for the first time he saw the truth: the final borrowed bed, the pitiful dressing table whose clouded, patient mirror would not reflect his image again, the chipped porcelain washbasin with the water and towel and soap meant for other hands, the heartless speed of the octogonal clock racing toward the ineluctable appointment at seven minutes past one on his final afternoon of December 17. Then he crossed his arms across his chest and beganto listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o' clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows,the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mouring, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity be repeated again.//
What do You think about The General In His Labyrinth (2004)?
This is wonderful. Dense with historical incident, deft characterization, and the telling detail that is García Márquez's hallmark. It's the story of Simon Bolivar--he who liberated South America from Spanish colonial tyranny--and his retreat from public life just prior to his death. The great trick of the novel is to make condensed passages of historical summary ring with life through the recollections of the dying General. Predictably perhaps he obsessively catalogs his enemies' perfidities which on some level seem to be the very disease which is killing him, though it's actually TB. Such is the loyalty of the man's officers that just before his death he sends them off on various guerilla missions to undermine the governments of his enemies. Despite the sure knowledge of his impending death he seeks to promote insurrection instead of harmony. It's for this reason that John Lynch, one of Bolivar's biographers, detests the popular idea of the man as the "George Washington of South America." Truly, he was nothing of the kind. He allowed himself to be named Liberator and Dictator in Peru. He promulgated multiple contradictory edicts when he was in power. He was against popular representative government. Though, paradoxically, he believed in a vision of US-like federalist union for South America, he was incapable of putting goals for the growth of inclusive democratic institutions above his petty enmities, as Washington did so regularly and with such aplomb. We also meet his longtime, forebearing lover, Manuela Sáenz, and find her to be as formidable a character as the General himself. At one point some weeks after after the General and his retinue have traveled into exile on a cortege of barges down the Magdalena, she incites civil unrest back in Santa Fe de Bogata against his enemies: In an attempt to make her life impossible, the Ministry of the Interior had asked her to turn over the [General's] archives she had in her care. She refused and set in motion a campaign of provocations that drove the government mad. In the company of two of her warrior slavewomen [manumitted] she fomented scandals, distributed pamphlets glorifying the General, and erased charcoal slogans scrawled on public walls. It was common knowledge that she entered barracks wearing the uniform of a colonel and was apt to take part in the soldiers' fiestas as in the officers' conspiracies. The most serious rumor was that right under Urdaneta's nose she was promoting an armed rebellion to reestablish the absolute power of the General. So a beautifully written if dense narrative that satisfies on multiple levels. Do read it. One final note, there's no magical realism here as in The Autumn of the Patriarch or One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the narrative is nonchronological which demands an attentive reader. This is no in-flight or beach read! I found it deeply satisfying.
—William1
I liked a lot of this book! It talks about the last days of the general Simón Bolívar. We see everything the general passed through and it was a really tough life, I would say. Pratically, many people who he trusted just betrayed him in awful ways... And he had to deal with the pain of that, besides the physical pain he had to handle because of his disease.The writing of this book its kinda hard, I say this for me, of course, and some scenes were a little bit hard to imagine, that was part of the reason for me to not give 5 stars to this book. With this book, I learned (besides of many other lessons) that not everything in life is what it seems (by saying that I mean this book reinforced that idea). For example, people who we trust with all the trust we have and in a second they just turn their backs and become our enemies because of greed or some other stupid reason.When Bolívar left this life, he left a question which all of us should think about 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'. With this, we should ask ourselves. What is the labyrinth? Is live or die? Or is it the meaning of life? Is it the suffering? All of this question will haunt all of us for the rest of our lifes.
—Cheila Alves
Idleness was painful after so many years of wars, bitter governments, and trivial loves.The profundity of Simón Bolívar’s vision became the bane of his life. He was destined to be the man who led the Latin American people to freedom from the imperial rule of Spain. Having broken the shackles of slavery he took over the uncontested leadership of the vast continent as the President with the singular aim of unifying the freed countries of the Americas into "the greatest republic the world has ever known,” a dream that was never to come true. In this historical novel, Marquez leads the reader to travel in the heavy footsteps of the despondent and disillusioned General on his final voyage along the Magdalena river to tell the unmagical story of shattered dreams, broken allegiances, dead glories - made all the more intolerable by the General’s terminal illness.This is a portrait of the man, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios, not a politico-military biography of the great General who came to be known as the Liberator, and to whom generations of Latin Americans have sung songs of praise and gratitude, and in our times have named their countries after him, finding in his person a newfound confidence to defy another empire in the north that sees them as “our backyard.” But here Marquez, without ever stating it, is poised to dispel the myths, spun, on one hand, by the great mass that loved and admired him and, on the other, by his enemies and detractors among his own people who had once broken the bread of victory alongside him in the wars of liberation.Bolívar's rise and fall is told in flashbacks within the frame story of his last river journey, which he undertook when he renounced power after an assassination attempt, to highlight major events that shaped him to become the man we have come to know. An able soldier and a great military strategist always in a state of flux, he could enact whole battlefields on his mind's screen with all the moves and strategies to be employed for various contingencies, is now relegated to his sagging hammock in which, lying at night like a deadweight, he mumbles incomprehensible twaddle in the state of recurrent delirium, such that his faithful servant, José Palacios, cannot tell whether his master’s thoughts are trapped in the throes of a nightmare or entangled in the state of waking. He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness, 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!He is stricken but not defeated. Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one. He cooks up imaginary battles to wrest Riohacha from the insurgents who are destroying the unity of the continent, but suddenly finding his army on the defensive, crashes into his chair. One day he announces his immediate intention to pack up and set sail for Europe to die there; yet the next morning he takes baffling detours and lingers on for weeks in a place, waiting for some portent to tell him which way to go. In a Marquezian slant the rigours of madness become a saving virtue; it is precisely his illusions which are keeping him sane. But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.During the last months of his life he became an ungainly mass of calcified bones and poisoned flesh held together by the pale leather of his cracking skin, whose purpose of mind no one understood, whose purpose of mind he himself did not understand.Marquez evokes the starkly beautiful terrain of the Amazonian wild tropics with imagery that permeates the ancient landscape of his One Hundred Years of Solitude. It seems the General must have stopped at Macondo on his voyage along the Magdalena. Marquez does not mention the town perhaps because it’s fictional or does not fall along the coast, and this story is supposed to be an historically accurate depiction, which it is, save for some auxiliary details which are used to enhance Bolívar's character and to embolden his human dilemmas, enacted for the reader through the eyes of a man to whom the world had appeared a miasmic swamp of dead bodies and dead hopes. In that, Marquez has weaved an astounding horror story.True to the maxim that there is humour in human tragedy, Marquez embellishes this sad story with the strokes of a tragicomedy in the General’s fatalistic and self-loathing utterances that confound and dishearten his loving supporters, but the General cares naught. I will illustrate it with two small examples.A German adventurer came down to the continent to capture an oddity he’d heard described "a man with rooster claws," to put in a cage and display in European circuses. He told of his wish to the General when they met during the voyage along the river. The General had found another opportunity to direct his mordant sarcasm at himself. "I assure you you’ll earn more money showing me in a cage as the biggest damn fool in history.”On the General's orders, his orderlies had taken on board an emaciated and limping dog found along the banks suffering from a horrible case of mange. The General bestowed special affections on the awful-looking creature, fed him by his own hand, played with him, and spent more time with him than he would with his young lover. After a few days on board…. The General was taking the air in the stern when José Palacios pulled the dog over to him.“What name shall we give him?” he asked.The General did not even have to think about it.“Bolívar,” he said.June 2015
—Jibran
