A WRITER’S DILEMMA

Publication of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novella raises the question — what claims do a writer’s wishes have on his legacy

WOULD FRANZ KAFKA’S The Trial or The Castle have reached readers had it not been for the obduracy of his friend Max Brod, who refused to honour the writer's wishes and have the manuscripts destroyed? Three decades after his death, Vladimir Nabokov’s son, similarly, ignored his father's wishes: The Original of Laura was published as the writer's last incomplete manuscript. In his absence, what claims do a writer's wishes have on his estate and legacy? It is a question that has plagued the literary world over the years, gathering momentum in recent decades because of its considerable commercial implications. The publication of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's novella, Until August, next week – a decade after his death — reignites it, given that the Nobel laureate left instructions for its destruction.

In his lifetime, the story of Anna Magdalena Bach — a 40-something woman whose annual pilgrimage to her mother's grave is also a day of rebellion against unfulfillment — had been Márquez's Achilles’ heel. He had begun work on it in the late Nineties, around the time he was detected with cancer, abandoning it in favour of Living to Tell the Tale (2003) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). When he returned to the book, advancing dementia made its contours elude Márquez. Yet, from the vantage point of hindsight, his sons felt that the writer's wish could be overruled.

Early readers of the novella have claimed that the book is both Márquez and not quite. There are glimpses of his sorcery with words but they are gone too soon. As with Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, a year before her death, and in essence an early draft of her Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, here, too, the writer is a shadowy presence. Publishing the book is unlikely to dent Márquez’s legacy, but it also points at the possibility that perhaps, in the end, a writer remains the most honest critic of his work, bowing neither to commerce nor to vanity.