This is really sad news. Even though he was very old and sick and we somehow expected this outcome, when I heard the news today I was in shock and a lump grew in my throat. García Márquez was a literary beacon in my teens and twenties; I've since outgrown reading him and moved on but I still admire him dearly. I think I must have read all his fiction. Of course I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude and I've read it more than once. But my favorite among his novels Love in the Times of Cholera and Chronicle of a Dead Foretold. Goodbye Gabo; long live your memory through your outstanding work!
Gabriel García Márquez
- Thread starter Stewart
- Start date
Stevie B
Current Member
Garcia Marquez is the author who first sparked my interest in international fiction. One Hundred Years of Solitude was a reading assignment in a Latin American Civilization class I took freshman year in college. At the time, I was surprised (but pleased) to see that the professor had selected several novels as course texts (One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta was also included). I read Solitude and, like many of you, was inspired to go on a Gabo reading binge. Surprisingly, though, Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel that has so far eluded my night stand. Guess I have something happy to look forward to on this sad day.
Daniel del Real
Moderator
As I keep reading the rest of GGM's works as a tribute after his death I confirm what I thought about him; his works are incredibly uneven.
Yesterday I finished his third novel, La Mala Hora/In Evil Hour and found it just plain. The language is there, baroque & antique, beautifully constructed sentences flowing to build up powerful images, but the story is just poor, dull and pointless. An embryonic prologue to Cien Años de Soledad, but there are just sparkles of the grandiosity that would come later. A lot of short stories of that time, that also contain inevitable strokes of his masterwork are better worked and deliver a stronger message in 20 pages that this novel in 150. If all these stories had to be written in order to give birth to Cien Años de Soledad, then everything's worth it; otherwise these novel and many short stories related are totally disposable.
Yesterday I finished his third novel, La Mala Hora/In Evil Hour and found it just plain. The language is there, baroque & antique, beautifully constructed sentences flowing to build up powerful images, but the story is just poor, dull and pointless. An embryonic prologue to Cien Años de Soledad, but there are just sparkles of the grandiosity that would come later. A lot of short stories of that time, that also contain inevitable strokes of his masterwork are better worked and deliver a stronger message in 20 pages that this novel in 150. If all these stories had to be written in order to give birth to Cien Años de Soledad, then everything's worth it; otherwise these novel and many short stories related are totally disposable.
Bartleby
Moderator
Read his first novel (maybe novella), known in English as Leaf Storm. It was very engaging, the way he always is, no wonder he's called a master storyteller, the attention he gives to his characters and his conciseness and poetic language grips me. Sure, being a first major work it may not be always well rounded, some characters you feel were there unnecessarily, but setting these considerations aside, the reading is so compulsive. You can sense a feeling of yearning, joy, loss, and loneliness in every word. It cured me from a reader's block I was experiencing recently, it made me find joy in reading again, and for that I am grateful.
D
Deleted member 83959
Guest
I'm in Colombia currently so I've been reading some GGM. Reread 100 Years of Solitude (I read it almost 10 years ago for high school and barely remembered it). The Faulkner influence really shows. Likewise, the influence of both Faulkner and GGM now seems very evident to me in Mo Yan's work. Nearly all of his longer novels seem to be borrowing exactly from the style used in 100 Years. I never really thought about this before but now it's just so blatantly obvious. 5/5
Chronicle of a Death Foretold was very underwhelming. I read it in one sitting on the plane. It's perfectly fine as another "building block" in an author's oeuvre but as a stand alone work it's not really anything noteworthy. The structure of it is similar to "In a Grove" by Akutagawa in that it portrays a murder from several points of view and I totally get that that's the point, but it seemed lacking to me. GGM should have elaborated more on the history of Arabs in Latin America (a fascinating topic that I've seen featured in several cooking shows actually) or on the characters' inner emotions more. It's one of his journalistic works but it completely lacked the magic of 100 Years for me. 3/5
Chronicle of a Death Foretold was very underwhelming. I read it in one sitting on the plane. It's perfectly fine as another "building block" in an author's oeuvre but as a stand alone work it's not really anything noteworthy. The structure of it is similar to "In a Grove" by Akutagawa in that it portrays a murder from several points of view and I totally get that that's the point, but it seemed lacking to me. GGM should have elaborated more on the history of Arabs in Latin America (a fascinating topic that I've seen featured in several cooking shows actually) or on the characters' inner emotions more. It's one of his journalistic works but it completely lacked the magic of 100 Years for me. 3/5
tiganeasca
Moderator
I just discovered that the New York Times has a new series that I was previously unaware of: "essential guides" to the works of some great authors. It seems to have been happening for a while now (Marquez is the seventh author listed). My objection? The guides appear to all be written by NYHT reporters. Now they may have additional qualifications that aren't listed, but I'm honestly not sure that I want a newspaper reporter--for the NYT or any other newspaper--telling me what I should know about these authors. Anyway: judge for yourself. I can't put the entire article here because it's too long. But: you can find it here or, if you prefer, you can leer en español. As always, if you have trouble accessing the article, let me know and I'll send it to you.
Leseratte
Well-known member
Thanks, Tiga! The García Marques guide was written with much charm, I subscribed to the series. It seems that the Times is bend on making people read more literature.
Ben Jackson
Well-known member
Tiga, can you provide links for the other authors?
tiganeasca
Moderator
If you can access the Garcia Marquez article, the links are all at the bottom. In any case:
Toni Morrison
Stephen King
Colette
Philip K. Dick
Agatha Christie
Patricia Highsmith
Papageno
Well-known member
Hey, this seems like huge news - a new novel by Gabriel García Márquez ("We will see each other in August") will be published next year!
This is an excerpt from the article:
“No?! A Gabriel García Márquez book?” said Juan Moreno Blanco, a professor at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, who was lost for words at the news. “I had heard rumours of some manuscripts, but nothing more than rumours. An entire book?!”
Speculation has surrounded the unpublished title ever since 1999 when García Márquez published a short story in the Colombian magazine Cambio.
The tale of Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who has an erotic affair while visiting a tropical island to lay flowers on her mother’s grave, was allegedly the first chapter Márquez was working on.
This is an excerpt from the article:
“No?! A Gabriel García Márquez book?” said Juan Moreno Blanco, a professor at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia, who was lost for words at the news. “I had heard rumours of some manuscripts, but nothing more than rumours. An entire book?!”
Speculation has surrounded the unpublished title ever since 1999 when García Márquez published a short story in the Colombian magazine Cambio.
The tale of Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who has an erotic affair while visiting a tropical island to lay flowers on her mother’s grave, was allegedly the first chapter Márquez was working on.
tiganeasca
Moderator
Gabriel García Márquez Wanted to Destroy His Last Novel. It’s About to Be Published.
By Alexandra Alter
New York Times, March 6, 2024
Toward the end of his life, when his memory was in pieces, Gabriel García Márquez struggled to finish a novel about the secret sex life of a married middle-age woman. He attempted at least five versions and tinkered with the text for years, slashing sentences, scribbling in the margins, changing adjectives, dictating notes to his assistant. Eventually, he gave up, and issued a final, devastating judgment.
“He told me directly that the novel had to be destroyed,” said Gonzalo García Barcha, the author’s younger son.
When García Márquez died in 2014, multiple drafts, notes and chapter fragments of the novel were stashed away in his archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The story remained there, spread over 769 pages, largely unread and forgotten — until García Márquez’s sons decided to defy their father’s wishes.
Now, a decade after his death, his last novel, titled “Until August,” will be published this month, with a global release in nearly 30 countries. The narrative centers on a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to a Caribbean island every August to visit her mother’s grave. On these somber pilgrimages, briefly liberated from her husband and family, she finds a new lover each time.
The novel adds an unexpected coda to the life and work of García Márquez, a literary giant and Nobel laureate, and will likely stir questions about how literary estates and publishers should navigate posthumous releases that contradict a writer’s directives.
Literary history is littered with examples of famous works that wouldn’t exist if executors and heirs hadn’t ignored authors’ wishes.
On his deathbed, the poet Virgil asked for the manuscript of his epic poem “The Aeneid” to be destroyed, according to classical lore. When Franz Kafka was gravely ill from tuberculosis, he instructed his friend and executor, Max Brod, to burn all of his work. Brod betrayed him, delivering surrealist masterpieces like “The Trial,” “The Castle” and “Amerika.” Vladimir Nabokov directed his family to destroy his final novel, “The Original of Laura,” but more than 30 years after the author’s death, his son released the unfinished text, which Nabokov had sketched out on index cards.
With some posthumous works, the writer’s intentions for the text were unclear, leading scholars and readers to wonder how complete it was, and how much latitude editors took with the manuscript. Occasionally, estates and heirs have been criticized for tarnishing an author’s legacy by releasing inferior or unfinished works in order to squeeze the last bit of intellectual property out of a literary brand name.
For García Márquez’s sons, the question of what to do with “Until August” was complicated by their father’s conflicting assessments. For a while, he worked intensely on the manuscript, and at one point sent a draft to his literary agent. It was only when he was suffering severe memory loss from dementia that he decided it wasn’t good enough.
By 2012, he could no longer recognize even close friends and family — among the few exceptions was his wife, Mercedes Barcha, his sons said. He struggled to carry on a conversation. He would occasionally pick up one of his books and read it, not recognizing the prose as his own.
He confessed to his family that he felt unmoored as an artist without his memory, which was his greatest source material. Without memory, “there’s 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,” Rodrigo García, the eldest of his two sons, said. “He was no longer able to even follow the plot, probably.”
Reading “Until August” again years after his death, his sons felt García Márquez may have judged himself too harshly. “It was much better than we remembered,” García said.
His sons acknowledge that the book doesn’t rank among García Márquez’s masterpieces, and fear that some might dismiss the publication as a cynical effort to make more money off their father’s legacy.
“We were worried of course to be seen as simply greedy,” García said.
Unlike his sprawling, lush works of magical realism — epics like “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which has sold some 50 million copies — “Until August” is modest in scope. The English language edition, which comes out on March 12 and was translated by Anne McLean, unfolds over just 107 pages.
The brothers argue that it’s a valuable addition to García Márquez’s body of work, in part because it reveals a new side of him. For the first time, he centered a narrative on a female protagonist, telling an intimate story about a woman in her late 40s who, after nearly 30 years of marriage, begins seeking freedom and self-fulfillment through illicit love affairs.
(continued in the next post)
By Alexandra Alter
New York Times, March 6, 2024
Toward the end of his life, when his memory was in pieces, Gabriel García Márquez struggled to finish a novel about the secret sex life of a married middle-age woman. He attempted at least five versions and tinkered with the text for years, slashing sentences, scribbling in the margins, changing adjectives, dictating notes to his assistant. Eventually, he gave up, and issued a final, devastating judgment.
“He told me directly that the novel had to be destroyed,” said Gonzalo García Barcha, the author’s younger son.
When García Márquez died in 2014, multiple drafts, notes and chapter fragments of the novel were stashed away in his archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The story remained there, spread over 769 pages, largely unread and forgotten — until García Márquez’s sons decided to defy their father’s wishes.
Now, a decade after his death, his last novel, titled “Until August,” will be published this month, with a global release in nearly 30 countries. The narrative centers on a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to a Caribbean island every August to visit her mother’s grave. On these somber pilgrimages, briefly liberated from her husband and family, she finds a new lover each time.
The novel adds an unexpected coda to the life and work of García Márquez, a literary giant and Nobel laureate, and will likely stir questions about how literary estates and publishers should navigate posthumous releases that contradict a writer’s directives.
Literary history is littered with examples of famous works that wouldn’t exist if executors and heirs hadn’t ignored authors’ wishes.
On his deathbed, the poet Virgil asked for the manuscript of his epic poem “The Aeneid” to be destroyed, according to classical lore. When Franz Kafka was gravely ill from tuberculosis, he instructed his friend and executor, Max Brod, to burn all of his work. Brod betrayed him, delivering surrealist masterpieces like “The Trial,” “The Castle” and “Amerika.” Vladimir Nabokov directed his family to destroy his final novel, “The Original of Laura,” but more than 30 years after the author’s death, his son released the unfinished text, which Nabokov had sketched out on index cards.
With some posthumous works, the writer’s intentions for the text were unclear, leading scholars and readers to wonder how complete it was, and how much latitude editors took with the manuscript. Occasionally, estates and heirs have been criticized for tarnishing an author’s legacy by releasing inferior or unfinished works in order to squeeze the last bit of intellectual property out of a literary brand name.
For García Márquez’s sons, the question of what to do with “Until August” was complicated by their father’s conflicting assessments. For a while, he worked intensely on the manuscript, and at one point sent a draft to his literary agent. It was only when he was suffering severe memory loss from dementia that he decided it wasn’t good enough.
By 2012, he could no longer recognize even close friends and family — among the few exceptions was his wife, Mercedes Barcha, his sons said. He struggled to carry on a conversation. He would occasionally pick up one of his books and read it, not recognizing the prose as his own.
He confessed to his family that he felt unmoored as an artist without his memory, which was his greatest source material. Without memory, “there’s 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,” Rodrigo García, the eldest of his two sons, said. “He was no longer able to even follow the plot, probably.”
Reading “Until August” again years after his death, his sons felt García Márquez may have judged himself too harshly. “It was much better than we remembered,” García said.
His sons acknowledge that the book doesn’t rank among García Márquez’s masterpieces, and fear that some might dismiss the publication as a cynical effort to make more money off their father’s legacy.
“We were worried of course to be seen as simply greedy,” García said.
Unlike his sprawling, lush works of magical realism — epics like “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which has sold some 50 million copies — “Until August” is modest in scope. The English language edition, which comes out on March 12 and was translated by Anne McLean, unfolds over just 107 pages.
The brothers argue that it’s a valuable addition to García Márquez’s body of work, in part because it reveals a new side of him. For the first time, he centered a narrative on a female protagonist, telling an intimate story about a woman in her late 40s who, after nearly 30 years of marriage, begins seeking freedom and self-fulfillment through illicit love affairs.
(continued in the next post)
tiganeasca
Moderator
(continued from the previous post)
Still, some readers and critics may question their choice to release a work that García Márquez himself considered incomplete, potentially adding a disappointing footnote to a towering legacy.
In his native Colombia, where García Márquez’s face appears on the currency and anticipation for the book is high, many in literary circles are eager for anything new by García Márquez, however unpolished. Still, some are wary of the way the novel is being sold.
“They’re not offering it to you as a manuscript, as an unfinished work, they are offering you the last novel by García Márquez,” said the Colombian writer and journalist Juan Mosquera. “I don’t believe in the grandiloquence we bestow on it. I think it is what it is — a great commercial moment for the García Márquez signature and brand.”
The Colombian novelist Héctor Abad said he was skeptical about the publication at first, but changed his mind when he read an advance copy.
“I was afraid it might be an act of commercial opportunism, and no, it is quite the opposite,” Abad, who will appear at an event celebrating the novel in Barcelona, said in an email. “All the virtues that made the best García Márquez great are also present here.”
There’s no doubt that García Márquez at one point felt 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 Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, and in The New Yorker. He set the project aside to finish his memoir and published another novel, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” which got mixed reviews. He began working on it intensely again in 2003, and a year later, he sent the manuscript to his agent, the late Carmen Balcells.
In the summer of 2010, Balcells called Cristóbal Pera, an editor who had worked with García Márquez on his memoir. She said that García Márquez, who was then in his 80s, was trying to finish a novel, and asked Pera to help him. García Márquez was highly guarded about his works in progress, but a few months later, he allowed Pera to read a few chapters of the novel, and seemed excited about it, Pera recalled. About a year later, his memory faltering, the author struggled to make sense of the narrative, but continued to scribble notes in the margins of the manuscript.
“It was therapeutic for him, because he was able still to do something with a pen and paper,” Pera said. “But he was not going to finish.”
When Pera gently urged García Márquez to publish the book, the author was firmly against it. “He said, at this point in my life, I don’t need to publish anything else,” Pera recalled.
After his death at age 87, various versions of “Until August” were kept at the Ransom Center archives.
Two years ago, García Márquez’s sons decided to take a fresh look at the text. The novel was messy in places, with some contradictions and repetition, they said, but it felt complete, if unpolished. It had flashes of his lyricism, like a scene where Ana, about to confess her infidelity to her mother’s grave, tightens her heart “into a fist.”
Once the brothers decided to publish the novel, they faced a puzzle. García Márquez had left at least five versions in various stages of completion. But he provided a clue about which one he preferred.
“One of the folders that he kept had a ‘Gran OK final’ on the front of it,” García Barcha said.
“That’s before he decided it was not OK at all,” his brother added.
Last year, when they asked Pera to edit the novel, he started working from the fifth version, dated July 2004 — the one marked “Gran OK final.” He drew on other versions as well, and from a digital document that García Márquez’s assistant, Mónica Alonso, had compiled, with various notes and changes that the author had wanted to make. Often, Pera was confronted with competing versions of a sentence or phrase — one typed, one scribbled by hand in the margins.
Pera tried to correct inconsistencies and contradictions, such as the protagonist’s age — García Márquez wavered on whether she was middle-aged or closer to 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 wouldn’t add a single word that wasn’t from García Márquez’s notes or different versions, they said.
As for the fate of any other unpublished works by García Márquez, his sons say it’s not an issue: There’s nothing else. Throughout his life, García Márquez routinely destroyed older versions of published books and unfinished manuscripts because he didn’t want them to be scrutinized later.
That was among the reasons they decided to publish “Until August,” they said.
“When this book is released, we’ll have all of Gabo’s work published,” García Barcha said. “There is nothing else in the drawer.”
Still, some readers and critics may question their choice to release a work that García Márquez himself considered incomplete, potentially adding a disappointing footnote to a towering legacy.
In his native Colombia, where García Márquez’s face appears on the currency and anticipation for the book is high, many in literary circles are eager for anything new by García Márquez, however unpolished. Still, some are wary of the way the novel is being sold.
“They’re not offering it to you as a manuscript, as an unfinished work, they are offering you the last novel by García Márquez,” said the Colombian writer and journalist Juan Mosquera. “I don’t believe in the grandiloquence we bestow on it. I think it is what it is — a great commercial moment for the García Márquez signature and brand.”
The Colombian novelist Héctor Abad said he was skeptical about the publication at first, but changed his mind when he read an advance copy.
“I was afraid it might be an act of commercial opportunism, and no, it is quite the opposite,” Abad, who will appear at an event celebrating the novel in Barcelona, said in an email. “All the virtues that made the best García Márquez great are also present here.”
There’s no doubt that García Márquez at one point felt 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 Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, and in The New Yorker. He set the project aside to finish his memoir and published another novel, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” which got mixed reviews. He began working on it intensely again in 2003, and a year later, he sent the manuscript to his agent, the late Carmen Balcells.
In the summer of 2010, Balcells called Cristóbal Pera, an editor who had worked with García Márquez on his memoir. She said that García Márquez, who was then in his 80s, was trying to finish a novel, and asked Pera to help him. García Márquez was highly guarded about his works in progress, but a few months later, he allowed Pera to read a few chapters of the novel, and seemed excited about it, Pera recalled. About a year later, his memory faltering, the author struggled to make sense of the narrative, but continued to scribble notes in the margins of the manuscript.
“It was therapeutic for him, because he was able still to do something with a pen and paper,” Pera said. “But he was not going to finish.”
When Pera gently urged García Márquez to publish the book, the author was firmly against it. “He said, at this point in my life, I don’t need to publish anything else,” Pera recalled.
After his death at age 87, various versions of “Until August” were kept at the Ransom Center archives.
Two years ago, García Márquez’s sons decided to take a fresh look at the text. The novel was messy in places, with some contradictions and repetition, they said, but it felt complete, if unpolished. It had flashes of his lyricism, like a scene where Ana, about to confess her infidelity to her mother’s grave, tightens her heart “into a fist.”
Once the brothers decided to publish the novel, they faced a puzzle. García Márquez had left at least five versions in various stages of completion. But he provided a clue about which one he preferred.
“One of the folders that he kept had a ‘Gran OK final’ on the front of it,” García Barcha said.
“That’s before he decided it was not OK at all,” his brother added.
Last year, when they asked Pera to edit the novel, he started working from the fifth version, dated July 2004 — the one marked “Gran OK final.” He drew on other versions as well, and from a digital document that García Márquez’s assistant, Mónica Alonso, had compiled, with various notes and changes that the author had wanted to make. Often, Pera was confronted with competing versions of a sentence or phrase — one typed, one scribbled by hand in the margins.
Pera tried to correct inconsistencies and contradictions, such as the protagonist’s age — García Márquez wavered on whether she was middle-aged or closer to 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 wouldn’t add a single word that wasn’t from García Márquez’s notes or different versions, they said.
As for the fate of any other unpublished works by García Márquez, his sons say it’s not an issue: There’s nothing else. Throughout his life, García Márquez routinely destroyed older versions of published books and unfinished manuscripts because he didn’t want them to be scrutinized later.
That was among the reasons they decided to publish “Until August,” they said.
“When this book is released, we’ll have all of Gabo’s work published,” García Barcha said. “There is nothing else in the drawer.”
Ben Jackson
Well-known member
Surprising seeing a new Nobel Laureate's work been published, and from Gabo for that matter.
Bartleby
Moderator
I was reading this Guardian review earlier today and it explains well what the book's faults are and its (slight, apparently) merits; one thing that intrigued me, or rather two, were the premise and what the reviewer described as an almost cinematic approach to storytelling, I like such approaches. I'm not sure if I'd put the book that high on my tbr, though, especially since I'm yet to catch up with most of Gabo's works.
www.theguardian.com
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez review – a ‘lost’ last novel
This slight work by the Latin American master explores sex, betrayal and damaging secrets through the story of a woman’s one-night stands
www.theguardian.com
Phil D
Well-known member
I'll be interested in how the book is received (and how it sells) but I'm with Bartleby: not high on my TBR; not even high on my Gabo TBR at the moment.
My take, based purely on my own cynicism, is that this is mostly a cash grab by the sons. At the same time, I'm not really worried about how this publication affects García Márquez's literary reputation. I think that's pretty safe at this point.
My take, based purely on my own cynicism, is that this is mostly a cash grab by the sons. At the same time, I'm not really worried about how this publication affects García Márquez's literary reputation. I think that's pretty safe at this point.
Leseratte
Well-known member
It´s always a pleasure to read these good articles from NY Times.