Acclaimed writer wanted this book destroyed

BOOK REVIEW

Until August: A Novel Gabriel García Márquez; translated from Spanish by Anne Mclean

Knopf

The sons of the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez decided to publish a manuscript that supposedly frustrated the Colombian master of magical realism while he was in the grips of dementia. It lay unpublished for nearly a decade after his death in 2014. In a controversial decision, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha published Until August,

apparently against their father’s final wishes.

The sons write their father had been in “a race between his artistic perfectionism and his vanishing mental faculties.” All they knew, “was Gabo’s final judgment: ‘This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.’ ”

Their “act of betrayal,” they write, is meant “to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations. If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us.”

Until August tells the story of a middle-aged married woman, Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels each year to an island to lay gladioli at the grave of her mother. On one of those trips, she picks up a silver-haired stranger in a linen suit at a hotel bar. She invites him up to her room, where she feels a “delicious terror.” He is an “exquisite lover,” and they have a onenight stand. But the memory is forever ruined when she wakes up to find the man has not only slipped out without saying goodbye but has also placed a $20 bill in a book she’d been reading.

On subsequent trips Ana looks, at times desperately, for other hookups. The descriptions of her trips include some real groaners — lines more reminiscent of a Harlequin romance.

“He took the hint and upped his game, guiding her by the waist with his fingertips, like a flower.”

“He then gave her an innocent kiss that shook her to her core and kept kissing her while removing her clothes piece by piece with magical mastery, until they succumbed to an abyss of pleasure.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it might be because parts of this unpublished book have been, well, published in both Spanish and English. There’s little insight about love here amid the cringey sex scenes. Still, the story of the book’s publication turns out to be more interesting than the book itself. According to an editor’s note, García Márquez’s assistant found two unfinished manuscripts in 2002. One became his final published book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

The other — Until August — occupied him for the next two years, writes the editor Cristóbal Pera, who says García Márquez ended up with five versions. His sons, it seems to me, made the wrong choice by ignoring his wishes. But it was also an impossible choice.