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The General in His Labyrinth

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927. He studied at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947), Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1958), In Evil Hour (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). Many of his books are published by Penguin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in 2014. Latin American cultural theorist Carlos J. Alonso, drawing on Freudian theory, argues that the novel is essentially a therapeutic device, designed to help move Latin America past its problematic experience of modernity. He compares this to the way the healing state of mourning replaces grief in the process of recovering from a death. Both activities are mechanisms for dealing with loss. Alonso believes that The General in his Labyrinth, by almost entirely centering the novel on the General's death, forces the reader to confront the horror of this process. [54] In Alonso's view, the reader is meant to pass from "a melancholy relationship vis-a-vis the figure of Bolívar to a relationship that has the therapeutic qualities of mourning instead". [55] On the first night of the voyage, the General stays at Facatativá with his entourage, which consists of José Palacios, five aides-de-camp, his clerks, and his dogs. Here, as throughout the journey that follows, the General's loss of prestige is evident; the downturn in his fortunes surprises even the General himself. His unidentified illness has led to his physical deterioration, which makes him unrecognizable, and his aide-de-camp is constantly mistaken for the Liberator. Flags of Our Fathers (reviewed December 4) re-creates the past by exploring a document of the war: the famous photograph of the American flag-raising. Letters From Iwo Jima adopts the same narrative strategy but uses as its documents the correspondence (both delivered and unsent) of Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima. So the American film is about visual images and the manufacture of public meaning; the Japanese film, about words and personal convictions. Here is a paradox: Although the great majority of the characters in Letters From Iwo Jima believe they must offer their lives for their emperor, their manner of making that sacrifice turns out to be highly individual.

Having previously written shorter fiction and screenplays, García Márquez sequestered himself away in his Mexico City home for an extended period of time to complete his novel Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. The author drew international acclaim for the work, which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. García Márquez is credited with helping introduce an array of readers to magical realism, a genre that combines more conventional storytelling forms with vivid, layers of fantasy. The General never leaves South America. He finishes his journey in Santa Marta, too weak to continue and with only his doctor and his closest aides by his side. He dies in poverty, a shadow of the man who liberated much of the continent. Plimpton, George (2003), Latin American Writers at Work, New York: The Modern Library, ISBN 0-679-77349-5 .If I write that you must undergo this trial–you, rather than young Ofelia, the heroine with the rosy face and unpromising name–it’s because the magic that many films promise actually works in Pan’s Labyrinth. Beginning with the dizzyingly hypnotic opening shot–or, even before there’s an image, with the evocative sounds of the wind stirring, a lullaby sighing, a child gasping for breath–writer-director Guillermo del Toro succeeds in submerging you in Ofelia’s memory and imagination, where grown-up threats and struggles turn into fairy tales.

Marquez’s Bolivar is conflicted. Most of the time his is anticipating his death and expecting the long-term failure of his dream of a unified continent. Yet he can’t quite put down some hope, that if only he can get another last gasp of life, if only he can convince his military and political leaders, then the dream might still come true. On this barge trip he reflects on the failure of his central dream, and the failure of his physical health, even his being itself. Within a few decades of Christopher Columbus's landing on the coast of what is now Venezuela in 1498, South America had been effectively conquered by Spain and Portugal. By the beginning of the 19th century, several factors affected Spain's control over its colonies: Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, the abdication of Charles IV, Ferdinand VII's renouncement of his right to succeed, and the placement of Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. [9] The colonies were virtually cut off from Spain, and the American and French Revolutions inspired many creoles—American-born descendants of Spanish settlers—to take advantage of Spanish weakness. As a result, Latin America was run by independent juntas and colonial self-governments. [10] Like the Patriarch in García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, Bolívar was an absolute dictator. [2] The Patriarch is never identified by name; Bolívar, too, is identified chiefly by his title. [62] Bolívar also invites comparison with Colonel Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude: both characters believe the wars they have waged have been fruitless and overwhelming, and both face numerous attempts on their lives, but eventually die of natural causes. [2] In his belief that life is controlled by fate, the General resembles Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Santiago Nasar in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. [2] I don’t know how you will value the imagination of Pan’s Labyrinth against the quasi-documentary realism of the only film I know as a touchstone, Victor Erice’s great The Spirit of the Beehive. It’s a question of the season, I suppose. There is a clear, wintry light to Erice’s film (which also concerns a fugitive hiding in the Spanish countryside and a child’s dreams of wonder)–an observational style and dramatic irony that may suit the chillier times in your life, and that were fitting to the film’s era. The Spirit of the Beehive was made and released when Franco still held power. Del Toro’s lunar, springtime fabulism, by contrast, is appropriate to another era, when the people of Spain know that dictators don’t rule forever. There is comfort in his film; but there is also a determination to remember, to keep faith and to encourage.A German adventurer came down to the continent to capture an oddity he’d heard described "a man with rooster claws," to put in a cage and display in European circuses. He told of his wish to the General when they met during the voyage along the river. The General had found another opportunity to direct his mordant sarcasm at himself. "I assure you you’ll earn more money showing me in a cage as the biggest damn fool in history.” 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 General Simon Bolívar, known in six Latin American countries as the Liberator, is one of the most revered heroes of the western hemisphere; in García Márquez’s brilliant reimagining, he is magnificently flawed as well. The novel follows Bolívar as he takes his final journey in 1830 down the Magdalena River toward the sea, revisiting the scenes of his former glory and lamenting his lost dream of an alliance of American nations. Forced from power, dogged by assassins, and prematurely aged and wasted by a fatal illness, the General is still a remarkably vital and mercurial man. He seems to remain alive by the sheer force of will that led him to so many victories in the battlefields and love affairs of his past. As he wanders in the labyrinth of his failing powers - and still-powerful memories - he defies his impending death until the last. in the house until it grew very late. He insisted that his aides-de-camp join the search, and the next day he delayed their departure . . . until he was vanquished by the repeated reply: there was no one. . . . At each port there is a stream of visitors who add interest, conflict, and incidental satire. Bolívar confronts a multitude of tribulations including ghastly weather conditions, enemies—Francisco de Paula Santander, in particular—his illness, and his paralyzing desire to return to his former glory. He wanders from port to town to house with his entourage, but he is not always treated with love and admiration.

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