page_title: The General in His Labyrinth
section_title: Genre
hierarchical_section_title: The General in His Labyrinth / Genre
caption_attribution_description: Description: Simon Bolívar Memorial Monument, near Santa Marta, Colombia Source: Louise Wolff (darina), May 2005
context_page_description: The General in His Labyrinth is a 1989 dictator novel by Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It is a fictionalized account of the last seven months of Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia. The book traces Bolívar's final journey from Bogotá to the Caribbean coastline of Colombia in his attempt to leave South America for exile in Europe. Breaking with the traditional heroic portrayal of Bolívar El Libertador, García Márquez depicts a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted. The story explores the labyrinth of Bolívar's life through the narrative of his memories, in which "despair, sickness, and death inevitably win out over love, health, and life".
  Following the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez decided to write about the "Great Liberator" after reading an unfinished novel by his friend Álvaro Mutis. He borrowed the setting—Bolívar's voyage down the Magdalena River in 1830—from Mutis.
context_section_description: Critics consider García Márquez's book in terms of the historical novel, but differ over whether the label is appropriate. In his review of The General in his Labyrinth, Selden Rodman hesitated to call it a novel, since it was so heavily researched, giving Bolívar's views "on everything from life and love to his chronic constipation and dislike of tobacco smoke". On the other hand, reviewer Robert Adams suggested that García Márquez had "improved on history". According to critic Donald L. Shaw, The General in His Labyrinth is a "New Historical Novel", a genre that he argues crosses between Boom, Post-Boom, and Postmodernist fiction in Latin American literature: "New Historical Novels tend either to retell historical events from an unconventional perspective, but one which preserves their intelligibility, or to question the very possibility of making sense of the past at all." Shaw believes that this novel belongs to the first category. García Márquez is presenting both a historical account and his own interpretation of events.
  David Bushnell, writing in The Hispanic American Historical Review, points out that the work is less a pure historical account than others suggest. García Márquez's Bolívar is a man "who wanders naked through the house, suffers constipation, uses foul language, and much more besides." He argues that documentation does not support many of these details. Bushnell suggests, however, that the fact that the novel is not entirely historically accurate does not necessarily distinguish it from the work of professional historians. The main difference, Bushnell believes, is that García Márquez's work "is far more readable" than a pure history.
caption: Memorial to Simón Bolívar at the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino just outside Santa Marta, Colombia. The final pages of The General in His Labyrinth are set in Santa Marta.
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