intertextuality can be seen in the repetition of patterns between books. For example, both Jose Arcadio Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Bolívar in The General in his Labyrinth experience labyrinthian dreams. Genre Critics consider García Márquez's book in terms of the historical novel, but differ over whether the label is appropriate. In his review of The General in his Labyrinth, Selden Rodman hesitated to call it a novel, since it was so heavily researched, giving Bolívar's views "on everything from life and love to his chronic constipation and dislike of tobacco smoke". On the other hand, reviewer Robert Adams suggested that García Márquez had "improved on history". According to critic Donald L. Shaw, The General in His Labyrinth is a "New Historical Novel", a genre that he argues crosses between Boom, Post-Boom, and Postmodernist fiction in Latin American literature: "New Historical Novels tend either to retell historical events from an unconventional perspective, but one which preserves their intelligibility, or to question the very possibility of making sense of the past at all." Shaw believes that this novel belongs to the first category. García Márquez is presenting both a historical account and his own interpretation of events. David Bushnell, writing in The Hispanic American Historical Review, points out that the work is less a pure historical account than others suggest. García Márquez's Bolívar is a man "who wanders naked through the house, suffers constipation, uses foul language, and much more besides." He argues that documentation does not support many of these details. Bushnell suggests, however, that the fact that the novel is not entirely historically accurate does not necessarily distinguish it from the work of professional historians. The main difference, Bushnell believes, is that García Márquez's work "is far more readable" than a pure history. Reception The General in His Labyrinth was relatively poorly received by the general public in the United States, despite the praise of critics. Critic Ilan Stavans, who himself praised the book as "one of the writer's most sophisticated and accomplished", attributes this to the novel's time period and to its profusion of historical information, neither of which proved attractive to English-speaking readers. Isabel Alvarez Borland notes that, like Stavans, "critics in the United States have largely celebrated García Márquez's portrait of this national hero and considered it a tour de force"; but she also observes that in Latin America the book received more