The betrayal of Garcia Marquez
TUNTIL AUGUST
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Viking, €20.99 he publication of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “rediscovered” novel, Until August, has provoked much controversy. Before his death in 2014, the Colombian Nobel Laureate, already suffering with dementia, insisted the text not see the light of day. “This book doesn’t work” and “must be destroyed”, he told his sons Gonzalo Garcia and Rodrigo in no uncertain terms.
But they have defied their father’s wishes and published it anyway, judging the text to be “much better than [they] remembered”, as they put it in their afterword apologia. Such a decision is not without precedent, of course; to cite perhaps the most notorious example, Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend and literary executor, betrayed the great Czech modernist’s wishes, and we have him to thank for giving us masterpieces like The Trial, The Castle and Amerika.
While not without certain qualities, Until August neither compares with such classics nor with Garcia Marquez’s most accomplished works.
The slight narrative – the book is more a novella than a novel – focuses on Ana Magdalena Bach and her yearly visits to the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother is buried.
Though content in her marriage to a renowned musician and academic, her visits – ostensibly to lay gladioli on her mother’s grave – morph into something else entirely: a pretext for the mother of two to pursue an annual one-night stand.
The first and most erotically stimulating ends in humiliation; her lover leaves a $20 bill as he leaves the sleeping Ana. The rest of the story chronicles the impact of her infidelity, as well as her subsequent attempts to relive the thrill of that first encounter minus the indignity of its ending.
There is little in Until August to compare with Marquez’s best short fiction, never mind with full-bodied tours de force like One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) or The General in His Labyrinth (1989), beside which it feels remarkably underdeveloped. Its repetitions – perhaps evidence of his declining memory – fail to add bulk to what is really a draft. Its characters, and even Bach herself, remain inert and lifeless; they are sketches, not credible individuals.
Stylistically, translator Anne McLean captures some inevitable flashes of brilliance – Marquez’s inspired description of the silence that follows an argument as “vitrified”, for example – but this is overwhelmed by all too many instances of stodgy, even ugly prose. One of the most glaring examples of this comes about halfway through the book, when one of Ana’s lovers invites her to the beach to witness a total lunar eclipse. Goading her to join him, he says: “There is no escape [...] it is our destiny.”
It’s a moment of cringe melodrama which Marquez – or at least his translator – follows with: “The supernatural invocation dispensed with her scruples.”
Such heavy-handed turns of phrase seem evidence of precisely why he had qualms about publishing the book.
The late Czech novelist Milan Kundera was uncompromising in his view that having the ability and prerogative to decide what constitutes one’s oeuvre is an integral part of being an artist, and that it is incumbent on others – family, friends and fans alike – to respect this.
Far from diminishing his reputation, that Marquez found Until August wanting as a whole is a testament to an astute aesthetic sensibility, which he maintained right up until the end of his life. For all the book’s deficiencies, his sons’ “act of betrayal” (their words) has at least proven this.