Baltasar Bustos is a kind of Don Quixote in pursuit of chivalric adventures and of his own lady Dulcinea as well. Fuentes has said that Bustos is also modeled on Pierre Bekuzov, the plump bespectacled hero of War and Peace. Pierre is a captive of Napoleon's army in that novel, not an actual fighter in the war against the French. Bustos owes something to Voltaire's Candide, also, a seriocomic story featuring a young idealist as he discovers the real human world.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth (1989) is also about the Wars of Independence. Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator, is being carried down river and into exile. But he is mortally ill and is really about to die.

The great union of South American countries he had envisioned can never take place. The lands he has freed are divided into squabbling separate states.

Bolivar...