any hour to have him read aloud from a dull book or take notes on urgent extemporizations". One of the least developed of the minor characters is the General's wife, María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alayza, who had died, readers are told, in mysterious circumstances shortly after their marriage. The General has "buried her at the bottom of a water-tight oblivion as a brutal means of living without her"; she only fleetingly enters his memories in the book's last chapter. According to Menton, she is "upstaged" by Manuela Sáenz, whose later history García Márquez recounts as if she instead were the General's widow. María Teresa's death, however, marked the General's "birth into history", and he has never tried to replace her. Major themes Politics In The General in His Labyrinth, García Márquez voices his political views through the character of the General. For example, Alvarez Borland points out that in the scene where the General responds to the French diplomat, his words closely reflect García Márquez's 1982 Nobel Address. The diplomat is critical of the barbarism in Latin America and the brutal means used in attempting to achieve independence. Bolívar replies by pointing out that Europe had centuries to progress to its current state, and that South America should be left to experience its "Middle Ages in peace". Similarly García Márquez remarks in his Nobel Speech that "venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see [Latin America] in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall ...". The novel was published in 1989, when the Soviet Union was disintegrating and the political map was being radically redrawn. Reviewing The General in His Labyrinth in 1990, the novelist Margaret Atwood pointed to another instance of García Márquez raising political issues through the character of the General. He has him tell his aide that the United States is "omnipotent and terrible, and that its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all". Atwood noted the contemporary relevance of this sentiment, since "the patterns of Latin American politics, and of United States intervention in them, have not changed much in 160 years." She suggested that García Márquez's fictionalization of Bolívar is a lesson "for our own turbulent age ... Revolutions have a long history of eating their progenitors." The central character is