Description: Marquez enjoys world-wide popularity and it is not surprising that much has been written about him. But a further reason for the enormous critical literature is that, despite his apparent transparency as a consciously popular writer, his fiction is peculiarly elusive of interpretation. Much good criticism of Marquez came in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the perception of his fiction has been dominated by that novel. It seemed the implicit goal to which the earlier fiction had been striving. In The General in his Labyrinth it emerges that the Bolivar figure is a reworking of earlier solitaries from throughout Marquez fiction and the fading of myth into history has its full pregnancy in the light of this double reference. By concentrating on the later novels, including The General in his Labyrinth, this study brings out the internal dialogue between the novels so that One Hundred Years of Solitude stands out, like Don Quixote in Cervantes' oeuvre, as atypical yet more deeply representative. Behind the popular impact of its 'magical realism' lies Marquez' abiding meditation on the nature of fictional and historical truth.

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