Garcia Marqez's Bolivar seems credible but maybe because Garcia Marquez has formed our ideas about Latin America

I have to laugh again at the weird specificity of Garcia Marquez - he has an odd penchant for enumerations. A guy never suffered saber wounds but he was, rather, stabbed 14 times by a saber. A woman doesn't steal a password and sneak past the guard posts, but she sneaks past seven guard posts. Who's doing all this counting? I once wrote parody of Garcia Marquez (and others) as a column imagining what if various famous authors had been hired to write the sequel to Gone with the Wind. Began something like: It had been 421 restless nights and 17 nights of peaceful sleep since Rhett Butler had last ... - I don't know, something like that, wish I could track it down. His very specificity, self-consciously comic as it may be and a witty sendup of his old days as a journalist when he had to rely on the facts, does serve the purpose of building credibility within the extreme emotions and situations of his plots: if he knows that he was stabbed 14 times, he must have really done his research, and everything else must be true - even the guy followed by a cloud of butterflies. In "The General in His Labyrinth," the need for veracity is greater because he is writing about a historical figure, so we want to be sure he's not "making it up." N.America readers like me are at sea - he could tell me almost anything about Bolivar and I'd believe it. His bio of the last days of Bolivar seems credible - but only because so much of our knowledge and experience and preconceived ideas about Latin America has been formed by Garcia Marquez himself.