Bob Newman's Reviews > The General in His Labyrinth

Inside your labyrinth you’ll meet your own private minotaur

A novel that mixes South American history with legend and the lush verbiage of a Nobel Prize-winning author can’t be bad. Yet, like too much dulce de leche ice cream, this story of the last months of Simon Bolívar, liberator from Spanish colonial rule of much of South America, may prove overwhelming. As the sick, declining hero heads from Bogotá, present day Colombia’s rainy capital, to the tropical northern coast down the Magdalena River (famously portrayed in “Love in the Time of Cholera” by the same author), he is beset not only by many physical ailments, but also by memory. He mourns his ultimate inability to construct a single large nation out of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. His dream of such an entity has collapsed into civil wars, coups, rebellions, and quarreling generals-turned-politician. He recalls the glory days when he won many a battle, but regards himself as a failure while many erstwhile citizens of these new countries still revere him as an all-conquering hero.

The slow disintegration of the Liberator himself and of all his hopes for a new continent occupies the entire book. There is no ancillary plot. He recalls a few lost loves, he gives away or forgets about his treasure, and is surrounded by doctors or soldiers. You meet many characters as he slowly progresses towards what can never be escape from his failed creation. As he sinks gradually into physical decrepitude, entering and leaving states of madness or delirium, he is stuck forever in the labyrinth of his mind and memories.

While I doubt if there will ever be a more literary exposition of Bolívar’s life, readers from outside the Bolivarian region may find this volume to be more than they bargained for. It’s a tour de force, but probably not for everyone.