The General in His Labyrinth

El general en su laberinto, 1989, translated by Edith Grossman in 1990. The general is Simón Bolívar, and the book covers only the last seven months of his life: the journey down the Magdalena toward the coast and an exile he never reaches, with the union of Spanish America he built already coming apart behind him. It is the least magical and most documentary of García Márquez’s novels — a founder’s last months, written without the consolation of the founding myth.

Context: the Fantasy section of the a16z list, listed under García Márquez’s selected works, fourth of five. The list groups his books as “sprawling family sagas” exploring solitude, love, power and circular time; this one applies that reading to a real person.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Gabriel García Márquez — the author.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude — the first of his titles on the list, already carded.
• Historical Fiction — the genre this one actually sits in.
• Power — what Bolívar is losing across the book.
• Literature — where this sits in the corpus.