In South America, heroic equestrian statues attest to the glory of Simón Bolívar—“The Liberator,” as he grandiosely but accurately called himself. In North America, Bolívar's name carries fewer resonances, but Gabriel García Márquez's new novel seems likely to help redress that situation. The General in His Labyrinth should certainly make Bolívar (1783-1830) better known than a conventional biography might, if only because any new book by the Nobel laureate is a literary event and assured of wide circulation. Still, García Márquez's new work is more demanding than his richly textured and accessible last novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. It is labyrinthine in parts.

García Márquez traces, and reflects upon, the life and career of Bolívar through an intricate and feverish series of flashbacks and occasional flash-forwards. As the book opens, the protagonist—driven out of power by his onetime comrades and ravaged by a wasting disease—is travelling down the Rio Magdalena to Cartagena on the coast of Colombia. He is on his way to an intended exile in Europe. It is his “return trip to the void,” as García Márquez puts it, the void being death, which overtakes Bolívar before he can finally tear himself away from the scene of his triumphs and disasters.

In leading the fight to free Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia from Spanish rule, Bolívar evolves a vision of a unified Latin America as “the most immense, or most extraordinary, or most invincible league of nations the world has ever seen”—a counterbalance to the United States in the North. It is one of history's unrealized dreams. The Americans went on to overcome all obstacles, up to and including history's most devastating civil war, to forge a cohesive nation, while the Latinos fell apart almost as soon as Bolívar brought them together.

García Márquez, the 20th-century intellectual, is at one with the 19th-century man of action, Bolívar, in castigating Americans' continual interference in the affairs of nations south of their border. Inviting them to send a delegation to the 1826 congress of newly independent Latin states in Panama “was like inviting the cat to the mice's fiesta,” says Bolívar. The cat is still on the prowl, as recent and current events in Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere attest.

But Bolívar's, and García Márquez's, strongest condemnation is reserved for the Latin Americans themselves, whose jealousy, bickering and easy corruptibility combined with the problems of geography and economics to destroy his dream of unity. “[Latin] America is ungovernable,” declares Bolívar as, at 47, he lies dying in his hammock of “moral torment [and] physical calamities.” In a bleakly prophetic political summing-up of the region's prospects, dictated to a secretary, he adds, “The man who serves a revolution plows the sea, this nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants.”

Flashes of humor, warmth and frank sexuality lighten the fevered recollections and dark introspections of Bolívar's last days. García Márquez's protagonist is as heroic in bed as on the battlefield, and claims a total of 35 mistresses—“not counting the one-night birds, of course.” The most durable of his lovers is the swaggering, cigar-smoking Manuela Saenz. Manuela is combative but unfailingly loyal. But it is not until almost the end of García Márquez's narrative that the author reveals the love whose loss changed Bolívar's life.

To his other women, in proper Latin American macho style, Bolívar “would not commit the least part of his life,” García Márquez writes. But Bolívar is so affected by the death of his aristocratic young bride that he feels impelled to put her out of his mind, never recalling her until he is on his deathbed, and never trying to replace her. While her death after only eight months of marriage devastates him, it does eventually set Bolívar, “a rich young gentleman from the colonies, dazzled by mundane pleasures and without the slightest interest in politics,” on the path to glory and eventual disaster.

Put that baldly, the metamorphosis of Simón Bolívar from playboy into liberator verges on the tritely romantic. As Bolívar himself says, “I am condemned to a theatrical destiny.” But filtered through the creative imagination of García Márquez, the recounting of such historical truths about Bolívar's life has a force that lifts the narrative far above mere theatricality. In The General in His Labyrinth, García Márquez has painted a memorable picture of greatness in decay, both physical and moral.