MADRID – Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s posthumous novel was a daunting challenge for the award-winning Colombian writer as he neared death 10 years ago, his sons said.
Until August, the final book by the Nobel Prize-winning giant of Latin American “magical realism”, is released in its original Spanish as En Agosto Nos Vemos on March 6, which is Garcia Marquez’s birthday. Its English version will be published on March 12, according to Ms Pilar Reyes, editorial director of Penguin Random House.
Fifteen years before his 2014 death, the affectionately nicknamed “Gabo” began writing the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who visits her mother’s grave on a Caribbean island every August, taking advantage of the trips to leave aside her family life and have erotic trysts with strangers.
Garcia Marquez read the first chapter publicly in 1999 but, unsatisfied with the rest of the work, declined to publish it. Instead, he handed versions of the manuscript over to his relatives.
The author, who earned international renown for novels such as Love In The Time of Cholera (1985), considered his last book a “mess” and should be discarded, sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo said in an online press event from Spain on March 5.
The book “became an indecipherable little thing” in the final years of his life, which were marked by illness and memory loss, Rodrigo, 64, said.
But close relatives decided to keep the manuscript and other fragments of Until August at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive and library at the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States.
According to Gonzalo, 60, academics who read parts of the work convinced the brothers to unify them into a book, to be released on what would have been their father’s 97th birthday.
“When we read the versions (again), we realised that the book was much better than we remembered,” he said.
“We began to suspect that, just as Gabo lost the ability to write, he also lost his ability to read”, as well as the “ability to judge” his own writings, he added.
While it was rumoured that Until August did not have an ending, Garcia Marquez’s children said that before his death, he fully developed the story of his protagonist.
“The novel was, if anything, a little scattered in an indeterminate number of originals, but it was complete,” Gonzalo stressed.
It was “a work of archaeology” to bring the pieces together and arrive at an ending, he said.
Rodrigo predicted there are no more hidden Garcia Marquez novels waiting in the wings. Until August is “the last survivor” of his literary oeuvre.
Garcia Marquez, who died in Mexico City, is considered one of the world’s most revered authors, the main engine in a major Latin American literary wave that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
Streaming platform Netflix will launch a series in 2024 inspired by his 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years Of Solitude. AFP
