Why Gabriel García Márquez’s lost novel is being published against his wishes
Until August, the rediscovered novel by one of the forerunners of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, will be published by Viking on March 12 next year
Legendary Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez — whose rediscovered novel Until August will be posthumously published next year, despite his explicit wishes to the contrary — worked with memory; it was his tool, like scores of other writers before and after him. Known for the intricate interweaving of memory and time, and the real and the fantastical, in novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, his twilight years were marred by a cruel twist of irony: he, the writer of memories — the collective memory of towns and families — began to lose his own.
The inexorable decline of his cognitive faculties entailed the inability to write, a blow to the writer — one of the forerunners, along with Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti and Augusto Roa Bastos, of the Latin American Boom in the 1960s — whose modernist techniques like magical realism had wowed the world. Before he died due to pneumonia, at the age of 87 in 2014, García Márquez was battling dementia, and also working on a new novel, which he didn’t want the world to read.
With his memory failing, Gabo — as he was affectionately called by his admirers in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond — decided that this new work should not be published after his death, though he had received his final sign off for the same. Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo (64, a filmmaker) and Gonzalo García Barcha (59, a graphic designer), have decided to release the book 10 years after the Nobel laureate’s death.
A tale of female freedom and desire
Translated from Spanish by Canadian translator Anne McLean, Until August follows a woman, Ana Magdalena Bach, who makes an annual sojourn to an island to commemorate her mother’s death anniversary, a journey that becomes an exploration of both freedom and regret, as well as the mysteries of love. It has been described as “an extraordinary and profound tale of female freedom and desire” by the publisher, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, which will bring out the novel on March 12, 2024.
The novel’s final cover and English language publication date were revealed at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday (October 18). Earlier, in May this year, Viking had announced that it had acquired the unpublished novel, En Agosto Nos Vemos (We’ll See Each Other Again in August). Isabel Wall, Viking’s editorial director, acquired the rights for the UK and the Commonwealth in an exclusive submission from the Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells in Barcelona, the literary agency that represents Márquez.
The publication of the ‘lost’ novel is being termed as a “landmark literary event” and a global collaboration between publishers, including Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House US and Random House in Spain. To mark the 10th anniversary of Márquez’s death, Penguin Random House UK will re-issue 16 titles from his backlist over the course of 2024, beginning with six titles on February 1: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera; No One Writes to the Colonel; Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Of Love and Other Demons; and Collected Stories.
The many shades of love
According to a release by Viking, initially, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha respected their father’s wishes, and the manuscript was locked away with his other papers in an archive at the University of Texas. However the duo later “reconsidered the book’s exceptional qualities, and how much of their father’s genius and colour and love lived within its words.” The publisher added: “After long deliberation they made the decision that the novel should finally be shared with millions of devoted readers around the world.”
Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha said: “Until August was the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds. Reading it once again almost 10 years after his death, we discovered that the text had many highly enjoyable merits and nothing that prevents us from delighting in the most outstanding aspects of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, his poetic language, his captivating storytelling, his understanding of humankind and his affection for our experiences and misadventures, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work.”
When Márquez reread his books during his old age, it was like reading them for the first time due to the fleeting grasp on his life and his achievements. “‘Where on earth did all this come from?’ he once asked me. He continued to read them until the end, eventually recognizing them as familiar books by the cover but understanding very little of their content. Sometimes, when closing a book, he would be surprised to find his photograph on the back cover, so he would reopen it and attempt to read it again,” writes Rodrigo Garcia in A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha (2021).
Standing at the foot of his bed during Marquez’s dying years, Rodrigo Garcia would notice how his father’s brain, despite the dementia (and perhaps aided by the morphine), was still ‘the cauldron of creativity’ that it always had been: “Fractured, perhaps, unable to return to thoughts or to sustain story lines, but still active. His imagination was always prodigiously fertile. Six generations of the Buendía family make up One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), but he had enough material for two more generations.”
The crux of his solitude
Though he had a gregarious nature and an apparent comfort with public life, Marquez was a private, sometimes even secretive, person. Though he did enjoy the global adulation, and was not quite unscathed by narcissism, there was always in him a suspicion of celebrity and of literary success. Before he received the Nobel Prize in 1982, he would always remind his family, and himself, several times over the years that neither Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, or Borges ever won the coveted literary prize, nor did three of his favourite writers: Virginia Woolf, Juan Rulfo, and Graham Greene. “Often it seemed to him that his success was not something he had achieved but something that had happened to him,” writes Rodrigo Garcia.
“Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, ‘I decline to accept the end of man.’ This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude,” Marquez had said in his Nobel acceptance speech. In 1949, in his Nobel acceptance speech, Faulkner had categorically refused to accept the end of man. “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.”
“I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail,” Faulkner had underlined.
Up until late in life, as Marquez’s memory was fading, he never reread his books for fear that he would find them embarrassingly wanting and that it would paralyze him creatively. Though he persistently denied that there was anything deliberately symbolic in his writing, and reserved particular disdain for the efforts to dissect and analyze it through academic or highbrow theories, Marquez knew that he was a slave to the unconscious, like everyone. He knew that things were standing in for other things. And, like so many writers, he was obsessed with loss and with its greatest manifestation, death: “Death as order and disorder, as logic and nonsense, as the inevitable and the unacceptable.”
Rodrigo Garcia recollects the pain of seeing his father in a state of anxiety, endlessly repeating himself over and over and over again during the early phase of dementia: “I work with my memory. Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it. Help me.” When he regained some tranquility, he would sometimes say, “I’m losing my memory, but fortunately I forget that I’m losing it.”