The Man Who Plowed the Sea

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated by Edith Grossman; Knopf; 285 pages; $19.95

Putting last things first is an old storyteller's trick, and there isn't a trickier old storyteller than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A good example of his skill comes early in this new novel about the final days of Simon Bolivar, and it is worth quoting if only to demonstrate how a maestro establishes his theme:

"It was the end. General Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios was leaving forever. He had wrested from Spanish domination an empire five times more vast than all of Europe, he had led 20 years of wars to keep it free and united, and he had governed it with a firm hand until the week before, but when it was time to leave he did not even take away with him the consolation that anyone believed in his departure. The only man with enough lucidity to know he really was going, and where he was going to, was the English diplomat, who wrote in an official report to his government: 'The time he has left will hardly be enough for him to reach his grave.' "

Bolivar died in 1830 at age 47, probably from tuberculosis. The Nobel- prizewinning novelist only suggests the cause of death, allowing the disease to spread subtly into metaphor. As ex-President Bolivar passes through corrupting cities and pestilential villages on the way to retirement, his dream of "one nation, free and unified, from Mexico to Cape Horn," collapses as surely as his consumptive lungs. Fever inspires delirious memories of battlefield victories and bedroom intrigues. Ideals, glory, vitality and hope are overgrown by failures.

But what failures! Garcia Marquez, like so many modern Latin American writers, sees the continent as a vast and howling tragedy. Bolivar, a Venezuelan aristocrat educated in the liberalism of 18th century Europe, vainly tries to plant progressive ideas in a New World dominated by Spain, a nation bypassed by the Enlightenment.

Scarcely a page of The General is free from images of reaction, decay and despair. The strongest character in the book is Bolivar's cigar-smoking mistress, a typical Garcia Marquez macho woman. Not surprisingly, the novel did not sit well with many Latin Americans when it was published last year in its original Spanish. The author's antimythic portrait of Bolivar as a mixed- blood man of the Americas nursing his lost cause offended those who preferred the familiar Europeanized hero prancing on horseback.

Neither version is completely true. More to the point, neither is dramatically convincing. The febrile mind and bodily functions of the famous dead are not off limits to a novelist, especially one of Garcia Marquez's talents. Yet in this novel his fabulist's imagination is overburdened by research. Historical names, dates and events frequently interrupt the mood that has been so carefully prepared to characterize Bolivar's last ride. True, Garcia Marquez unhorses a legend distorted by politics and patinaed by sentimentality, but Bolivar did a pretty good job of it himself. Schoolchildren may know him as the George Washington of South America, but a great many grownups remember Bolivar as the disillusioned man who said, "Those who have served the cause of revolution have plowed the sea."