SOURCE: Siegel, Lee. “Writer on the Stump.” Commonweal 118, no. 19 (9 November 1990): 662-64.

In the following unfavorable review, Siegel argues that, despite García Márquez's skillful prose, The General in His Labyrinth is still a disappointing and unoriginal work.

Few writers since the beginning of modernism's long slow decline have had such a distinct fictional vision as García Márquez. What some critics neatly refer to as his “magical realism” seems no less than an attempt at historical redemption—extreme imaginative acts meant to retrieve a civilization from an ongoing explosion of extreme events. His trademark metaphor—the solitude his characters wear like a crown of ice—is endlessly expansive. His very paragraphs are Promethean: they characteristically present the beginning and the end of an episode before its telling, as if the author never stopped wanting to show his contempt for time as a transparent artifice.

At first...