Resurrecting Marquez
Published posthumously, the Nobel laureate’s ‘last novel’ Until August is far from perfect. But we are grateful his sons released it
When an author decrees that his unpublished works be destroyed, why task a family member or friend with the job when they are unlikely to carry it out? Vladimir Nabokov’s wife Vera, and more famously, Franz Kafka’s friend Max Brod both went against authorial instructions, giving us a peep into a creative mind, in the first case with The Original of Laura, and the classics The Trial and
The Castle in the latter.
Vera Nabokov didn’t burn the index cards on which Nabokov’s novel resided, storing them in a bank vault instead. Their son Dmitri retrieved these a decade after her death and published the unfinished book. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s sons have done the same with Until August which had been nestling among his papers at the University of Texas in Austin.
The noble reasons for going against a writer’s wishes are: to understand the creative process, to complete the oeuvre (even if the final work itself is incomplete), to preserve the author’s reputation, to assist future scholars. The less noble reason is, simply, money. In the aesthetic versus economic argument, Nabokov lost out. His novel was panned by critics.
He was overcautious
It is easy to pan such efforts, though, for last works generally tend to be below par. It is easier still with Until August because Marquez himself had said, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” He had neatly anticipated the future, mocking time as playfully as he did in his novels. But he may have been overcautious.
The ethical question involved in the posthumous publication of Until August is separate from the literary one. The sons of the great Columbian Nobel laureate say in the Preface, “In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations.” When the public’s keenness to know comes up against an individual’s right to privacy, the latter stands no chance.
Marquez died 10 years ago, his final days and dementia movingly described by his son Rodrigo in A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes (2021). Rodrigo quotes his father as saying, “When I’m dead, do whatever you want.” In another chapter, he says, “(My father) was firmly against showing or preserving unfinished work. Many times during our childhood, my brother and I were summoned to sit on the floor of his study and help him rip up entire previous versions and throw them out…”
The sons were covered either way. As the novelist became aware of his mind slipping away, he said, “Memory is my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.”
Convenient excuses
In publishing Until August, the sons decided that the dementia may have affected Marquez’s judgement of this book too. It is a convenient justification, but posthumous publication needs no justification. Authors know if they want to destroy their work they have to do it themselves, as Thomas Hardy and Henry James did. Keepers of the flame have their own reasons to publish or not to.
Until August is most profitably read as a novella; it is coherent and consistent as it stands. It is far from perfect, however, although had it been written by someone else it might have been hailed as superb. But ‘superb’ is a comedown for a great writer, and that’s Marquez’s fate here.
“My work on this edition has been that of a restorer facing a great master’s canvas,” explains Marquez’s friend and editor Cristobal Pera in an afterword. Pera did the restoration while consulting Marquez’s five versions. The story makes up in an affectionate illustration of time passing routinely what it lacks by way of the rambunctious and the anachronistic as denoted by the term ‘magic realism’.
To stay with Pera’s analogy, this is a maquette for a larger ◣ work, a novella that contains a full novel waiting to be sculpted. We should be grateful that the sons disobeyed the father.
Until August can be seen as a companion to Marquez’s last novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005) which begins, “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”
First female protagonist
Here, a middleaged woman in a happy marriage visits a small island every August to place flowers on her mother’s grave. The ritual incorporates another ceremony — a sexual encounter with a stranger each time, each disappointing in a different way. Guilt leads to discovery of her husband’s past infidelity. Occasional sentences are embarrassing (one lover gives her “a supernatural pleasure that left her threshed and burning”) as well as delightful (“they all became old friends at first sight”).
On earlier visits, she had stayed at a hotel where the blades of a ceiling fan “barely stirred the heat”. Years later, she has to figure out how to use a key card and complains about her room, “I don’t have the slightest idea how this spaceship works.” A later chapter begins: “When she disembarked on the island, she saw her taxi was more dilapidated than ever and decided to take a new airconditioned one.” Progress in the island is contrasted with her lack of it.
The story is mostly all surface. Things merely happen. The reader thus becomes a character in the narrative, investing it with purpose. And filling in the fictional characters’ motivations depending on their own temperament. The author is nonjudgemental, standing outside the story. This deprives it of the intimacy and casual insights into human frailty that mark Marquez’s great works.
Melancholy is a theme — patently in the title of the previous book, as the old man searches for his lost youth. In this one, the female protagonist, Marquez’s first, is less sure of her impulses. She is affected by the experiences only once, the first time when the lover leaves a $20 bill before leaving. The satisfying denouement is recognisably Marquezian.
In Melancholy Whores, Marquez quotes Cicero: No old man forgets where he has hidden his treasure. It could have been about his own genius as writer and storyteller.
The reviewer’s latest book is Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?.