Therefore, with this book more keenly focused on that theme than all of them, then you can expect good things. Rate this book. The novel depicts the final voyage of the great Latin American liberator, General Simon Bolivar, down the Magdalena River in 1830. (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Gabriel García Márquez's most political novel is the tragic story of General Simón Bolívar, the man who tried to unite a continent. 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. And his biggest bone of all is old age and death and dying. 18,387 ratings, 3.69 average rating, 947 reviews. The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez. He did not agree. The General gave her a smile of complicity and reminded her of the lines in a low voice: The brilliance of his saber is the living reflection of his glory. Instead, it becomes a tedious recitation of the actions General Bolivar did in his journey from his town to the coast on his way to exile. Despair is the health of the damned.”, “Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to 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 mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again.”. Von Bogotá aus tritt Simón Bolívar, der Befreier großer Teile Südamerikas von Spanien, im Mai 1830 seine letzte Reise an. Bolivar is the Great Liberator, freeing the South American holdings of Spain from imperial rule, intending to create a single federalist republic of the former colonial states, a United States of South America, but having won independence, there are squabbles and rebellions among the armies of liberation. Neither does Marquez attempt to embellish Bolivar's standing in South American politics-for some a hero and for others a monster, for some a liberator and for others a monster, Marquez is able to capture the complexity of not just Bolivar's role in the liberation of South America, but on the positive and negative effect it had on its citizens and how that coloured their views on Bolivar. The rest was darkness. ; I couldn't quite say. Refresh and try again. Faced with this state of the world, the General tended to his insomnia by walking naked through the deserted rooms of the old hacienda mansion, which was transfigured by brilliant moonlight. The General already had his boot in the stirrup that the groom was holding for him when the Minister of the Army and Navy called to him: "Excellency." See what your friends are reading. 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. The great trick of the novel is to make condensed passages of historical summary ring with life through the recollections of the dying General. In some ways Marquez is upending typical fictional accounts of great men, which usually concentrate on their greatness and skip their humanity, whils. Masterful. I'll say again, GGM is similar to Murakami in that each book is another installation in his theme-and-variation riffs that he keeps releasing (I mean to say, nearly all the books are the same story with minor changes--something that can be strong in the right hands). Gabriel José de la Concordia Garcí­a Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. “The only wars here will be civil wars, and those are like killing your own mother.”, “Don't stay with Urdanetea, he told him. 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. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is at #2 on my All-Time Top 5 Books and I like magical realism. Perhaps it's to be scored slightly lower than G's two big ones ; maybe third or fourth? Marquez has written quite a few acclaimed masterpieces, and I like to think that The General in His Labyrinth is one of them. . The book is sort of. “... 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 General in his Labyrinth is the compelling tale of Simón Bolívar, a hero who has been forgotten and whose power is fading, retracing his steps down the Magdalena River by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. The General in his Labyrinth is the compelling tale of Simón Bolívar, a hero who has been forgotten and whose power is fading, retracing his steps down the Magdalena River by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Unfortunately, that is where "The General ..." parts ways with me. Autor: Gabriel García Márquez. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”, “Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.”, “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.”, “Damn it,' he sighed. This book is told in basically a journalistic style. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published The prose is sharp and beautiful when it needs to be (this is, after all, García Marquez), but the story held no interest. Cover Web. In this novel, Marquez recuses the great Simon Bolivar from mythology an ISBN 9780394582580 Item Price $ 65.00. Lieferstatus: Verfügbar. Apart from his vision for a united Latin America that would form the biggest country that would be "half of the world," his wars for integration, and his glories, no one cares to know about his end. Bolivar, in his late 40s, is dying and weighing his options—participate in another military campaign, leave for a European retirement and a chance to recover his health, or lend his support to a political solution. After all, this is a person wh, 'The General In His Labyrinth' is Marquez's fictional reconstruction of Simon Bolivar's, the liberator of South America from the Spanish, last days. 0394582586 Condition A Fine tight unread copy in a Fine bright dust jacket. It's the story of Simón Bolívar--he who liberated South America from Spanish colonial tyranny--and his retreat from public life just prior to his death. Gone is the man who could sleep on horse-back and conquer a city within a night, gone is the man who could charm, captivate and control whole countries and in his place is a man who can barely shave, who spends much of his time mumbling incoherently or stuck in a state of delirium and all of this adds to the fall of Bolivar. 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 :). New from. by Gabriel García Márquez. Predictably perhaps he obsessively catalogs his enemies' perfidies whic, This is wonderful. The reader gradually succumbs to the hypnagogic world fashioned by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; a world seen through the eyes of the now old and dying General Simon Bolivar, liberator of South America and revolutionist, but in the eyes of Marquez, a cynical and embittered man whose soul and body have been crushed an insurmountable weight of disillusion. Therefore, with this book more keenly focused on that theme than all of them, then you can expect good things. Very richly felt irony and self-awareness. Inhalt des … That's not surprising, given that Garcia Marquez worked as a reporter in his early days, but this book could have been so much more if it followed in the wake of his other works, in short. Garcia-Marquez, one of the world’s literary masters, not just of this era but of all time, tells the story of Simon Bolivar’s last months in this thoughtful, moving, elegiac novel. General Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life.