 García Márquez believed that most of the information available on Bolívar was one @-@ dimensional : " No one ever said in Bolívar 's biographies that he sang or that he was <unk> ... but historians don 't say these things because they think they are not important . " In the <unk> to the novel , García Márquez writes that he researched the book for two years ; the task was difficult , both because of his lack of experience in conducting historical research , and the lack of documentary evidence for the events of the final period of Bolívar 's life . 
