The General In His Labyrinth

A lyrical description of an old man at the dusk of his life.... The General in His Labyrinth...is also a portrait of Simon Bolivar, the extraordinary general who pushed the Spanish out of South America and whose dream of independence made him a hero in five countries...the mixture is rich....Sentence for sentence, there is hardly another writer in the world so generous with incidental pleasures. Robert Winder in the Independent Mr Garcia Marquez wades into his flamboyant...and ultimately tragic material with enormous gusto, heaping detail upon sensuous detail, alternating grace with horror, perfume with the stench of corruption...a fascinating literary tour de force and a moving tribute to an extraordinary man' Margaret Atwood in The New York Times Book Review The vigour and coherence of his imaginative vision, the brilliance and beauty of his imagery, the narrative tension...coursing through his pages...makes it difficult to put down.' Hilary Spurling in The Daily Telegraph Breathtaking...[a] superb fictional re-creation of Bolivar s last month Peter Conrad in The Observer Gives off sparks of grandeur...exquisite, opaque and smoky...Bolivar s final months take him down the great Colombian river, the Magdalena, where the crocodiles on the bank...laze with their mouths open to catch butterflies, and the heat lounges densely, thick and full of stinks. It is wonderfully evoked James Wood in The Guardian