Volume 53, Number 12 · July 13, 2006
The First Bolivarian Revolution
By J.H. Elliott
Simón Bolìvar: A Life
by John Lynch
Yale University Press, 349 pp., $35.00
'José Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.' In the arresting opening sentence of his poignant novel The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcìa Márquez gives us our first glimpse of Simón Bolìvar as his servant found him in the early morning of May 8, 1830, the day on which he would leave Bogotá on the journey into exile that would end with his death, some seven months later, on a sugar plantation close to the Colombian port of Santa Marta. John Lynch, who is not a novelist but a historian, and a former professor of Latin American history at the University of London, starts his new life of Bolìvar almost as effectively: 'On 26 March 1812 a massive earthquake struck Venezuela. From the Andes to the coast, from Mérida to La Guaira, the earth heaved and cracked, buildings crumbled and people perished in their thousands.' Lynch begins his book with his hero on the brink of an epic career; Garcìa Márquez begins his as it draws to its prolonged and painful close. In the eighteen intervening years not only Venezuela but all of Spanish America was struck by an earthquake—a human earthquake, whose name was Bolìvar.
Review, 4594 words
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