The title of the review says it all. Garcia Marquez still has a magical way of stringing together sentences and paragraphs with such beauty, but this novel is bogged down by sprawling, criss-crossing recollections and side-stories, including a list of generals, marshals, and aides-de-camp that is much too large to make sense of without drawing a map. It was truly a slog for me to finish, though GGM deftly handles the closing moments of the story, when death is finally the certain conclusion, with the grace and excellence of his best writing.