Until August review: In Márquez's lost novel, anatomy of a failing marriage

Every Márquez novel I have ever read transports, transfixes and transforms my world in more ways than I can ever describe. I read his “lost novel” like I have read all Márquez novels: completely forgetting about the world that surrounds me. Only the greatest books have the ability to do that to us. While Until August: The Lost Novel (Penguin Random House) is by no means the finest of Márquez's works, the bar has been set so high by his immortal classics that it is almost unfair to compare them at all.

Eternal returns

Ana Magdalena Bach, 46 years old when the novel begins, takes a ferry to an island every year on August 16 to visit her mother’s grave and offer a gladioli garland. For almost a decade, she has taken the same worn down taxi, has stayed at the same hotel and has bought the garland from the same florist. The novel brims with these repetitions and patterns that form a routine and rhythm. There are a few sentences too, which repeat at different moments in the novel: as if the actions are being committed to memory — that brutal and whimsical commander of our lives. This, perhaps, is more than just a narrative technique, as Márquez wrote and rewrote the novel — there are at least five authorised versions of the manuscript — in his final years, dealing with dementia and “vanishing faculties” as the Preface suggests.

As Márquez writes about Ana Magdalena Bach — as well as the other characters in the novel — the physical descriptions are formulaic. Even journalistic. But in his characteristic style which has perhaps no parallels, his descriptions of their inwardness win you over. His protagonist Ana Magdalena Bach inherited from her mother the “splendour of her golden eyes, the virtue of being a woman of few words, and the intelligence to manage her temper.”

In suggesting the inheritance of these traits, Márquez also foreshadows another connection between the mother and the daughter, which is only revealed at the end, and re-establishes in some ways, the incredible genius of Márquez — one of the most iconic masters of dramatic irony and foreshadowing. From the ever-astonishing use of adjectives and descriptors to a keen and intelligent understanding of human nature, various familiar strains and techniques which are uniquely Márquezian make the novel a highly rewarding reading experience.

Phantasmal flights (of love?)

At the age of 46 and after 27 years of being married to her loving husband, Ana Magdalena Bach is (on the surface) a deified, “desireless” mother of two. The novel soars, however, when this surface is breached to explore her complex inner world. In a style reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Until August is dispassionate about moral judgements. It has bigger ambitions. On her first night on the island, she meets a young man and takes him to her room. With incredible facility and grace, Márquez writes about not only their intimate moments, but also the destructive guilt of adultery that follows for his protagonist. Which is only worsened by the slight she receives in the morning at the hands of her bashful accomplice, who leaves her a 20 dollar note for the night.

Year after year, as she returns to the island, she searches for chances and encounters of nightly, furtive un-attachments. And year after year, Márquez inserts varieties to her encounters. Some chances she misses and regrets, others she prays on and reluctantly but still eagerly seizes. Through these episodes, what emerges is an incredibly tender and unsentimental portrait of a woman, who somehow discovers long lost parts of herself, but also bears the crippling costs of the exercise.

The big ambition of the novel, however, seems to be an assessment of a failing marriage. In one of the most powerful scenes of the novel, Ana Magdalena Bach confronts her husband, Doménico Amarís, a famous womaniser, about his lapses of loyalty during the course of their marriage. Undoubtedly, there are very few writers who can write as ably about lovers’ tiffs and jealousies and bitternesses, as Márquez. This is the novel’s beating heart — like so many other Márquez novels — where the characters are revealed to be humans.

Márquez writes at length about the sprawling intimacies and distances between the couple. From simple days of “frequent lovemaking,” to their gradual, consistent decline into mutual apathy… Even as a few embers of love burn too. As in so many of his novels, Márquez wins over the reader when he writes about the many, quizzical forms and phantasms of love. Of the many immortal sentences and passages that Márquez gifted his readers, most have been about love, arguably. After all, love reveals to us the most vulnerable and unreasonable qualities of our characters. Márquez has always managed to plumb these depths of the heart. To this end, even though incomplete and unpolished, Until August is a Márquezian classic.

Betrayals of memory

Ever since it was announced that Márquez's last incomplete novel will be published by his sons, a range of questions have been raised about this being an act of betrayal to the author’s wishes and memory.

Exactly 25 years ago, on March 18, 1999, it was announced that Márquez was working on a new work with a protagonist called Ana Magdalena Bach. The early drafts of the novel date back to the early 2000s. At first conceptualised as “a book that will include another three 150-page novellas,” Until August is holding barely onto 100 pages. The novel is prefaced with an earnest note by his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, in which they quote Márquez: “Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.” As Márquez lost his memory in his final years, and struggled to write with conviction and his famed all-consuming passion, Until August went through many rewrites. Written by Cristóbal Pera —Márquez's editor in the last decade of his life — the process of how the current novel has been (re)constructed from archival material is as fascinating to read as the novel itself.

Márquez wanted this novel to be destroyed. The literary world is currently divided on whether the book should have remained unpublished. A counter-question to these adamant critics would be, does even an atrophied work of art from a master of his craft diminish his legacy? This lost novel, as the author’s sons define it, is “the fruit of one last effort to carry on creating against all odds.” In its repeating patterns and sentences is not only a commitment to restore memory, but also a rhythmic repertoire, which resonates the vocations of Ana Magdalena Bach’s husband and son, who are both musicians. Another echo of the genius of Márquez.

In the Preface, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha admit to their betrayal, too: “In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations.” Whereas it is for each reader to assess the merit of this decision, Until August — even in its deprivation — is a triumph, being a tender access to a legendary writer’s (debilitating) faculties. It is also a beacon for our age, as with its overtures — tempered carefully by the knowledge of the vulnerability of its creator — it restores one’s faith in the magical promise of storytelling.