SOURCE: Palencia-Roth, Michael. “Gabriel García Márquez: Labyrinths of Love and History.” World Literature Today 65, no. 1 (winter 1991): 54-8.

In the following essay, Palencia-Roth examines the dominant thematic concerns in Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth, concluding that “taken together, these two most recent novels demonstrate once again the astonishing range of García Márquez's work and the empathetic flexibility of his mind and heart.”

After his first surprise best seller, Cien años de soledad (Eng. One Hundred Years of Solitude), burst on the literary scene in 1967 and transformed a group of writers (Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, and others) into a phenomenon known as “el boom,” bringing him and them worldwide fame, every work by Gabriel García Márquez has been published to great fanfare and has been widely reviewed. The books under joint discussion here...