[ad_1]
Towards the end of his life, when his memory was shattered, Gabriel García Márquez struggled to finish a novel about the secret sexual life of a middle-aged married woman. He attempted at least five versions and tweaked the text over the years, cutting out phrases, scribbling in the margins, changing adjectives and dictating notes to his assistant. In the end he gave up and issued a final and devastating sentence.
“He told me directly that the novel had to be destroyed,” said Gonzalo García Barcha, the author’s youngest son.
When García Márquez died in 2014, multiple drafts, notes, and chapter fragments of the novel were hidden in his archives in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The story remained there, spread across 769 pages, largely unread and forgotten, until García Márquez’s children decided to defy his father’s wishes.
Now, a decade after his death, his latest novel, titled “Until August,” will be published this month and will have its world premiere in nearly 30 countries. The narrative centers on a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to a Caribbean island every August to visit the grave of her mother. On these grim pilgrimages, briefly freed from her husband and her family, she each finds a new lover.
The novel adds an unexpected coda to the life and work of García Márquez, a literary giant and Nobel laureate, and will likely raise questions about how literary estates and publishers should deal with posthumous releases that contradict a writer’s directives.
Literary history is littered with examples of famous works that would not exist if the executors and heirs had not ignored the authors’ wishes.
On his deathbed, the poet Virgil asked that the manuscript of his epic poem “The Aeneid” be destroyed, according to classical tradition. When Franz Kafka became seriously ill with tuberculosis, he ordered his friend and executor, Max Brod, to burn all of his works. Brod betrayed him by delivering surreal masterpieces like “The Trial,” “The Castle,” and “Amerika.” Vladimir Nabokov ordered his family to destroy his last novel, “The Original Laura,” but more than 30 years after the author’s death, his son published the unfinished text, which Nabokov had outlined on index cards. .
In some posthumous works, the writer’s intentions for the text were unclear, leading scholars and readers to question how complete it was and how much latitude the editors took with the manuscript. Occasionally, inheritances and heirs have been criticized for tarnishing an author’s legacy by publishing inferior or unfinished works in order to squeeze every last bit of intellectual property out of a literary brand.
For García Márquez’s children, the question of what to do with “Until August” was complicated by their father’s contradictory assessments. For a time, he worked intensively on the manuscript and at one point sent a draft to his literary agent. Only when he suffered severe memory loss due to dementia did he decide he wasn’t good enough.
By 2012, I could no longer recognize even close friends and family; Among the few exceptions was his wife, Mercedes Barcha, his children said. He struggled to hold a conversation. He would occasionally take one of his books and read it, not recognizing the prose as his own.
He confessed to his family that he felt untethered as an artist without his memory, which was his greatest source of material. Without memory “there is nothing,” he told them. In that fractured state, he began to doubt the quality of his novel.
“Gabo lost the ability to judge the book,” said Rodrigo García, the eldest of his two children. “He probably couldn’t even follow the plot anymore.”
Reading “Until August” again years after his death, his children felt that García Márquez had perhaps judged himself too harshly. “It was much better than we remembered,” Garcia said.
His children acknowledge that the book is not among García Márquez’s masterpieces and fear that some will dismiss the publication as a cynical effort to make more money from their father’s legacy.
“Of course, we were worried that we would just be seen as greedy,” Garcia said.
Unlike his sprawling, lush works of magical realism (epics like “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which have sold some 50 million copies), “Until August” is modest in scope. The English edition, which will be released on March 12 and was translated by Anne McLean, runs to just 107 pages.
The brothers argue that it is a valuable addition to García Márquez’s work, in part because it reveals a new side to him. For the first time, he centered a narrative on a female protagonist, telling an intimate story about a woman in her 40s who, after almost 30 years of marriage, begins to seek freedom and personal fulfillment through illicit love affairs.
Still, some readers and critics may question his decision to publish a work that García Márquez himself considered incomplete, potentially adding a disappointing footnote to an imposing legacy.
In his native Colombia, where García Márquez’s face appears on the coin and anticipation for the book is high, many in literary circles are eager for something new from García Márquez, no matter how unpolished. Still, some are wary of the way the novel is sold.
“They don’t offer it to you as a manuscript, as an unfinished work, they offer you García Márquez’s latest novel,” said Colombian writer and journalist Juan Mosquera. “I don’t believe in the grandiloquence we give it. “I think it is what it is: a great commercial moment for the firm and the García Márquez brand.”
Colombian novelist Héctor Abad said he was initially skeptical of the publication, but changed his mind when he read an advance copy.
“I was afraid that it could be an act of commercial opportunism, and no, it is quite the opposite,” Abad, who will attend an event celebrating the novel in Barcelona, says in an email. “Here are also present all the virtues that made the best García Márquez great.”
There is no doubt that García Márquez at some point felt that the novel was worth publishing. In 1999 he read passages during a public appearance with the novelist José Saramago in Madrid. Excerpts from the story were later published in the main Spanish newspaper, El País, and in The New Yorker. She put the project aside to finish his memoirs and published another novel, “Memories of My Melancholic Whores,” which received mixed reviews. She returned to work intensively on it in 2003 and, a year later, she sent the manuscript to her agent, the late Carmen Balcells.
In the summer of 2010, Balcells called Cristóbal Pera, an editor who had worked with García Márquez on his memoirs. He said García Márquez, then 80 years old, was trying to finish a novel and asked Pera to help him. García Márquez was very cautious about his work in progress, but a few months later, he allowed Pera to read a few chapters of the novel and seemed enthusiastic about it, Pera recalled. About a year later, with memory failing, the author struggled to make sense of the narrative, but he continued scribbling notes in the margins of the manuscript.
“It was therapeutic for him, because he could still do something with pencil and paper,” Pera said. “But he wasn’t going to finish.”
When Pera gently urged García Márquez to publish the book, the author strongly objected. “He said that at this point in my life I don’t need to publish anything else,” Pera recalled.
After his death at age 87, several versions of “Until August” were preserved in the Ransom Center archives.
Two years ago, García Márquez’s children decided to take a new look at the text. The novel was confusing in places, with some contradictions and repetitions, they said, but it felt complete, if unpolished. It had flashes of her lyricism, like a scene in which Ana, about to confess her infidelity at her mother’s grave, clenches her heart “in a fist.”
Once the brothers decided to publish the novel, they faced a conundrum. García Márquez had left at least five versions in different stages of execution. But he gave a hint as to which one he preferred.
“One of the folders I kept had a ‘Big Final OK’ on the front,” García Barcha said.
“That was before I decided it wasn’t right at all,” his brother added.
Last year, when Pera was asked to edit the novel, he began working on the fifth version, dated July 2004, which said “Big Final OK.” It was also based on other versions and on a digital document that García Márquez’s assistant, Mónica Alonso, had compiled, with various notes and changes that the author had wanted to make. Pera was often faced with rival versions of a phrase or phrase: one typed and another hand-scribbled in the margins.
Pera tried to correct inconsistencies and contradictions, such as the age of the protagonist – García Márquez doubted whether she was middle-aged or rather elderly – and the presence, or absence, of a mustache on one of her lovers.
In constructing the most coherent version they could, Pera and the brothers established a rule: They would not add a single word that was not from García Márquez’s notes or from different versions, they said.
As for the fate of García Márquez’s other unpublished works, his children say it is not a problem: there is nothing else. Throughout his life, García Márquez routinely destroyed older versions of published books and unfinished manuscripts because he did not want them to be examined later.
That was one of the reasons why they decided to publish “Until August,” they said.
“When this book is published, we will have all of Gabo’s work published,” said García Barcha. “There’s nothing else in the drawer.”
Genevieve Glatsky contributed to this report from Bogotá.