TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091790/0917470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.5 KB | 81 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 78

The Man Who Plowed the Sea


By R.Z. SHEPPARD


THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated by Edith Grossman; Knopf; 285 pages; $19.95


    Putting last things first is an old story teller's trick,
and there isn't a trickier old storyteller than Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. A good example of his skill comes early in this new
novel about the final days of Simon Bolivar, and it is worth
quoting if only to demonstrate how a maestro establishes his
theme:

    "It was the end. General Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima
Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios was leaving forever. He had wrested
from Spanish domination an empire five times more vast than all
of Europe, he had led 20 years of wars to keep it free and
united, and he had governed it with a firm hand until the week
before, but when it was time to leave he did not even take away
with him the consolation that anyone believed in his departure.
The only man with enough lucidity to know he really was going,
and where he was going to, was the English diplomat, who wrote
in an official report to his government: `The time he has left
will hardly be enough for him to reach his grave.'"

    Bolivar died in 1830 at age 47, probably from tuberculosis.
The Nobel-prizewinning novelist only suggests the cause of
death, allowing the disease to spread subtly into metaphor. As
ex-President Bolivar passes through corrupting cities and
pestilential villages on the way to retirement, his dream of
"one nation, free and unified, from Mexico to Cape Horn,"
collapses as surely as his consumptive lungs. Fever inspires
delirious memories of battlefield victories and bedroom
intrigues. Ideals, glory, vitality and hope are overgrown by
failures.

    But what failures! Garcia Marquez, like so many modern Latin
American writers, sees the continent as a vast and howling
tragedy. Bolivar, a Venezuelan aristocrat educated in the
liberalism of 18th century Europe, vainly tries to plant
progressive ideas in a New World dominated by Spain, a nation
bypassed by the Enlightenment.

    Scarcely a page of The General is free from images of
reaction, decay and despair. The strongest character in the
book is Bolivar's cigar-smoking mistress, a typical Garcia
Marquez macho woman. Not surprisingly, the novel did not sit
well with many Latin Americans when it was published last year
in its original Spanish. The author's antimythic portrait of
Bolivar as a mixed-blood man of the Americas nursing his lost
cause offended those who preferred the familiar Europeanized
hero prancing on horseback.

    Neither version is completely true. More to the point,
neither is dramatically convincing. The febrile mind and bodily
functions of the famous dead are not off limits to a novelist,
especially one of Garcia Marquez's talents. Yet in this novel
his fabulist's imagination is overburdened by research.
Historical names, dates and events frequently interrupt the
mood that has been so carefully prepared to characterize
Bolivar's last ride. True, Garcia Marquez unhorses a legend
distorted by politics and patinaed by sentimentality, but
Bolivar did a pretty good job of it himself. Schoolchildren may
know him as the George Washington of South America, but a great
many grownups remember Bolivar as the disillusioned man who
said, "Those who have served the cause of revolution have
plowed the sea."