SOURCE: Adams, Robert M. “Liberators.” New York Review of Books 37, no. 15 (11 October 1990): 17-18.

In the following review, Adams praises the elegiac language of The General in His Labyrinth, contrasting the work with the fiction of Mario Vargas Llosa.

Some years ago a society of malcontents planted a large bomb under the roadway leading from Colombey-les-deux-Eglises to Paris. They exploded it almost on time, and blew up, instead of General de Gaulle, a car full of his bodyguards and secretaries. The general emerged from his undamaged vehicle, surveyed the carnage with a professional eye, and said simply, “Dommage. Une belle sortie.” In effect: A fine opportunity wasted.

Simón Bolívar, known simply but sufficiently as the Liberator, also suffered from a script writer with a bad sense of timing. Gabriel García Márquez, with more than a few touches of his novelist's art, has improved on history...