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.
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