Fate & longing, power & sex - but in a muted tone : Garcia Marquez

"The General in His Labyrinth" is meant to be, I suppose, an "ironic" title, as he's not really in a labyrinth but on a journey (at the front of the book is a map of Bolivar's journey), which is somewhat Odysseyan, an old man's voyage home, fraught with perils, including, during the long river voyage, an episode of crashing against the cliffs and maybe other elements recalling specific episodes in the Odyssey? The journey is straightforward, possibly doomed, futile, reminiscent of some Herzog S.American movies. But the labyrinth is in his mind - he's in the throes of it but not really in it. The labyrinthine elements of the novel concern his memories of his days of glory, the feats of strength, the nights of conquest - and in particular how these memories intersect with his final days, for example, during his journey a woman on horseback overtakes his entourage and Bolivar recalls meeting her many years before when he was starting on his quest to liberate the Americas, she lured him from his hammock in the night, seduced him, but refused to have sex, in the morning he learns that her goal was to get him out of his hammock to foil a nighttime assassination attempt, now she asks for a favor, a letter releasing her husband from prison, which Bolivar composes - an episode very typical of the mood of Garcia Marquez's fiction, imbued with fate and longing, power and sex but in a muted tone, and of course told with the weird obsession for detail, almost comic at times - it's never, for example, escorted by soldiers but rather escorted by a team of 8 soldiers wearing ... - getting in all the facts, real or imagined, stuff Garcia Marquez must have learned from his days as a journalist and which he emulates as a novelist but liberated not to invent facts and details at will.