Why the death of Simon Bolivar is a perfect Garcia Marquez subject

Finished "The General in His Labyrinth" - like many Everyman Library books a great book with a tedious, pedantic introduction - glad i didn't read it till the end. Concluding the novel, i see how the life or more accurately the death of Simon Bolivar is the perfect, almost the clicheed, Garcia Marquez subject, the old man dying and recollecting, in a nonlinear fashion, the conquests of his long life as he laments and refuses to acknowledge the failings and the decay of his body. A new dimension for Garcia Marquez in this rather late novel is the historical - based on a historical and not a familial nor fictive figure. He notes that he did quite a bit of research, and relied heavily on information from new friends and old, scholars and historians - yet the book never reeks of research & history. Like all of his fiction, it is nonlinear in form, and this effectively does capture the workings of the mind of a dying man. I would say that it does get a little tedious toward the end, as the direction is clear, ineluctable - the book quite intentionally lacks the drama of Bolivar's life, it's drama recollected, the war and the political intrigue are all there but in memory, not in the dramatic foreground. Interesting that the great emotional crisis of his life - the death of his 20-year-old wife and his decision to leave his life of comfort and gentility and devote himself to the liberation of the americas, is dispatched of in a single paragraph in the last chapter! Also interesting the G-M says he was drawn to the story by his interest in the river that Bolivar traveled - which he had traveled numerous times by steamer in his youth. It would be like me writing a novel about, say, President Kennedy because of my interest in the Garden State Parkway. And it's true that his writing about the river is probably the best and most evocative in the book - it's widening into swampland, the first vision of the coast -- but the book does not take the shape of a river journey, it's not Huck Finn, for example. It's a funeral procession. Other books of old men heading toward the grave? I know I've read others, can't recall them right now. All Garcia Marquez books are great in some ways; this is not his greatest but a significant and distinct entry in his corpus.