Don't go . . . to the United States,'' he warns a colleague. ''It's omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.'' As Carlos Fuentes has remarked, the air in the stern when Jose Palacios pulled the dog over to him. ''What name shall we give him?'' he asked. The General did not even have to think about it.

Rodríguez Vergara, Isabel (1998), "The General in his Labyrinth: Writing as Exorcism", Haunting Demons: Critical Essays on the Works of Gabriel García Márquez, Interamer, Organization of American States , retrieved 2008-03-22 . Trans. Anna Serra. Critics consider García Márquez's book in terms of the historical novel, but differ over whether the label is appropriate. In his review of The General in his Labyrinth, Selden Rodman hesitated to call it a novel, since it was so heavily researched, giving Bolívar's views "on everything from life and love to his chronic constipation and dislike of tobacco smoke". [66] On the other hand, reviewer Robert Adams suggested that García Márquez had "improved on history". [67] According to critic Donald L. Shaw, The General in His Labyrinth is a "New Historical Novel", a genre that he argues crosses between Boom, Post-Boom, and Postmodernist fiction in Latin American literature: "New Historical Novels tend either to retell historical events from an unconventional perspective, but one which preserves their intelligibility, or to question the very possibility of making sense of the past at all." [68] Shaw believes that this novel belongs to the first category. [68] García Márquez is presenting both a historical account and his own interpretation of events. [69]At the age of forty-six General Simón Bolívar, who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. Consumed by the memories of what he has done and what he failed to do, Bolívar hopes to see a way out of the labyrinth in which he has lived all his life. . ..

his dreams'' is won by the misfortunes, and the monster at the center of his '' labyrinth'' gets him in the end. Following the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), García Márquez decided to write about the "Great Liberator" after reading an unfinished novel by his friend Álvaro Mutis. He borrowed the setting—Bolívar's voyage down the Magdalena River in 1830—from Mutis. García Márquez spent two years researching the subject, encompassing the extensive memoirs of Bolívar's Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O'Leary, as well as numerous other historical documents and consultations with academics.

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His past is a patchwork of unrest and rebellion. Even after wresting control of South America from its absentee Spanish overlords, the General finds that pacifying his own people is itself a task of a lifetime. His dream of a unified South America recedes ever into the distance, an