The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcia Marques, tr. Edith Grossman (Alfred A Knopf, 1993)
Review by Jim McCurry

Gabriel Garcia Marquez does not need to remind us and himself of the ordinary griefs and betrayals, nor need he worry us and hold us in suspense concerning the ordinary turns of fate. There is a relaxed, uneventful character to The General in His Labyrinth (1990). I wonder if the reason that I do not want to stop reading this narrative lies in the balancing act ­ between inner and outer, fiction and history, past and present, reflection and action ­ that Garcia Marquez has sustained throughout these pages? 

Like a poem, this novel entrances me with its centripetal quietness, its assumption of an inner source of delight. It is in no hurry to finish. Individual phrases open like roses (e.g., “the ineluctable smell of roses”). Nuances open into worlds of suspended time and space for reflection. It is not as though, for example, we cared, or were led to care in the ways of realistic fiction, about the relationship between the General and Manuela. Or rather, perhaps, Marquez teaches us to care and not to care. 

Beneath the romantic flyleaf depicting the General’s hammock—exposed to the unhealthful night airs of a deceptively lyrical moonlit lagoon— the book is about as romantic as the emetics Bolivar resorts to. This book is no bath of purple verbena.

Absorbed in the magic of the river, dying, in defeat, perhaps 
he wondered if he might not have the courage to say to hell 
with the oregano and sage leaves and bitter oranges of Jose 
Palacios’ advice and sink down into a redemptive ocean of 
purple verbena along with his armies of beggars, his useless 
glories, his memorable errors, the entire country. 

And so I have been pondering it, resting in the perusal of a few pages at a time ­ my second time through, actually. I recommend that you try it too. Try it like one of the General’s periodic dips in a warm bath, one of his treatments for chronic insomnia: maybe with some slow music in the background, say the Concierto de Aranjuez, or maybe Charlie Haden’s recent NOCTURNE compact disc, featuring the great Cuban pianist, Gonzalo Rubalcaba. 

Marquez gives good guidance through the turnings, station to station, circle to circle. It is hard to think of Bolivar as a general. Stereotypes are banned from the precincts of this labyrinth. Marquez’s Bolivar is someone to ponder. Beneath and behind, immanent, here, and yet beyond all the turns and ups and downs of fortune, the author reaches through to a deeper sense of tragedy: the child’s first glimpse of not-knowing, the first recognition that one is a child of illusion, lost in the given: the starkness and mystery, the arbitrary character of one’s saga in space-time, one’s temporal existence, one’s life’s fairytale. A kind of profoundly understated stoicism, a stance of cold relinquishment, informs the following moment in this lovely, boring, and absorbing narrative:

He not only left without Manuela, but before leaving suggested 
as a matter of state the advantage of a definitive separation. 
‘I see that nothing can unite us under the auspices of innocence 
and honor,’ he wrote to her. ‘In the future you will be alone, 
although at your husband’s side, and I will be alone in the midst 
of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be 
our only consolation. 

Manuela, of course, is his mate though not his wife, and the General is dying, and both of them know it. Even so, this narrative by Bolivar’s apparent friend across time, Garcia Marquez, is a careful homage wrought so as to exclude any obsessive dwelling upon a particular event, this or that grand passion or fixed idea or relationship. And so we have not been told very much, involved very much, in a mimesis, or in any sort of detailed, conventional love story. The story of Manuela and Bolivar is presented sketchily, intermittently, and it is all the more moving for that reason. 

Too often in reviews we read something like the following: “The author portrays a friend unsentimentally, but lovingly, in such a way that we sense that, although the friend in actuality has died, yet within the pages of his book, the author cannot let him die.” That’s all right if you like it, I suppose, but I frankly do not care very much for that sort of “having it both ways.” And while I very much doubt that Garcia Marquez and I share the same beliefs concerning “last things,” it really does not matter very much in terms of the present book. In the scatological and sensitive and profound utterances of Bolivar, as well as in the author’s faithful movements of the pen, one discovers that the author has captured the universal in the particular (effortlessly, it seems), merging and shattering such compartments and categories as “lyric,” “epic,” and “historical.” 

The book is the labyrinth, the sentences are its passages, and in our slow progress, it is as if we had become shades, allowed by the author’s guidance and intervention to dog Bolivar’s last steps, to watch over his shoulder and hear his dying thoughts. Tied to time, “doomed to a dramatic existence,” we too waver between action and reflection ­ perhaps noticing that sometime around midnight the fiesta stopped playing and “the full moon caught fire in the patio filled with orange trees.”

Copyright © 2003 Jim McCurry