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“Gabriel Garcia Marquez versus Simon Bolivar”

Leonard’s review of Garcia Marquez’s historical novel about Simon Bolivar, The General in His Labyrinth. Leonard spends several pages opening the essay with a short history of Bolivar’s life (“Permit me to educate myself in public”) and a short review of Garcia Marquez’s earlier notable work:

One Hundred Years of Solitude is “wonderfully encompassing.”

Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is “journalistic.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is “a backwards murder mystery and send-up of romance novellas.”

Clandestine in Chile is an “odd little book.”

Love in the Time of Cholera is a “kind of Hispanic Cacoon.”

Autumn of the Patriarch (a book that Leonard hoped Labyrinth would “bookend”) is “still a masterpiece.”

Leonard seemed ready for greatness in the new book and declares, “Between them, Bolivar and Garcia Marquez invented Latin America.”

Ultimately, he’s disappointed  with his main objection being “…that Garcia Marquez has chosen to novelize the end of Bolivar’s life…omitting the beginning and the middle when the colors burned the brightest.” He sums up Labyrinth as “information instead of art.”

A younger,  more colorful, Bolivar:

I’ll take advantage of the opportunity to again quote the greatest first line in literature, from Solitude:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

New word: afflatus = a divine creative inspiration

New learning: “…the six chapters The Autumn of the Patriarch…mimic Bartok’s six string quartets.”