The General in His Labyrinth

Original title: El general en su laberinto. Translated into English in 1990.

Transmuting historical truth into magical narrative, Gabriel García Márquez recounts the turbulent life of the great Simón Bolívar. He shows us the Liberator, the dreamer fired by the vision of a South America free from Spanish domination and splendidly united - a vision he both succeeded and failed in realizing. He shows us Bolívar the dazzling orchestrator of political and military intrigue; the lover, the libertine, the fighter capable of heroism, mercy, ruthlessness. He gives us the man of flesh and blood, worthy of both adoration and anger, seen among his enemies and his partisans.

The story is told in the framework of a fantastic seven months' voyage down the wide Magdalena River from Bogotá to the sea. Bolívar, not yet fifty, but made old by the pressures of war, passion, triumph, and treachery, and now forced from power, embarks with his retinue on this journey that is at once a fantasy of triumphal progress from port to port and a nightmare of loss and disillusion. As Bolívar, in the fierce light of death's imminence, reexamines his life - confronting the phantoms of his past, reliving the campaigns that brought him renown and the amorous offensives that colored his sensibility - history rushes in and the reader is immersed in the momentous, decades-long adventure that Bolívar set in motion and that ultimately shaped the destiny of a continent.