MARQUEZ returns from the dead
Until August, exhumed by the great novelist’s children, is billed as his ‘final novel’. But the old literary magic is frustratingly variable, says Sarah Perry.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died in the spring of 2014 at the age of 87, has published a new novel, Until August. This is perfectly in keeping for a writer for whom time and mortality were always subordinate to story.
Yet the circumstances of the novel’s publication invite scrutiny. Marquez — a Nobel laureate; “the greatest Colombian who ever lived”; “Gabo” to his disciples — had begun to suffer from dementia by the time Memories of My Melancholy Whores was published in 2004. That novella was not kindly received, perhaps out of distaste for its subject, in which a 90-year-old man falls in love with an adolescent prostitute knocked unconscious by a concoction of valerian. Even readers sophisticated enough to remain equable in the face of fictitious incident might still have noted, in that novel’s absence of linguistic invention, signs of an intellect in decline.
Marquez had, some years before, conceived of a novel in five parts, each featuring a female protagonist. The first of these parts was published in The New Yorker in 1999, translated by Edith Grossman; further chapters appeared in the Spanish press. But Marquez wrestled unsuccessfully with the project, eventually concluding “this book won’t work. It must be destroyed.” So the manuscript was interred in the vaults of the University of Texas, until Marquez’s sons began to wonder whether their father’s diminishing faculties had compromised his ability to judge the novel’s merit, and prised open the tomb.
Here, no intelligent reader could dismiss the pangs of conscience. Is it an act of betrayal to read what a writer wanted destroyed? Or does literature demand a finer moral code: what would be lost had we never spied on Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West? The problem is both an artistic and a moral one. As a novelist myself, I have no solution.
Until August, then, is both new and not-new: parts of it have been in circulation for 25 years, but readers now have a novel as near to full as Marquez ever brought it, and translated into English by Anne McLean.
Its plot has a pleasing simplicity: Ana Magdalena Bach, a woman with remarkable eyes and a merry enough marriage, visits each summer the small island where her mother is buried. This annual ritual is carried out as a sacred duty, until a sexual encounter with a stranger proves so troubling and vivifying a force that each subsequent pilgrimage becomes, also, the possibility of sexual adventure.
The devoted reader will seek out their beloved Gabo. He is not absent. The setting is dislocated from ordinary time: Ana wears jeans, but reads a book with uncut pages; she is bewildered by “electronic keyboards”, but she and her lovers engage with anachronistic formality. For Marquez, it was never strange that the world is strange — so the cemetery island is simultaneously real and marvellous, with blue herons skimming a stormy lake, and “streets of burning sand beside a sea in flames”.
The novel’s chief concern is love, or more specifically sex — a subject Marquez always accorded the diligent, amused and unashamed attention it deserves. The novel is wisest and most persuasive when depicting the endlessly mutable transactions of desire, which can move within moments between compassion, want and fear: after intimate, strange and hurried sex, Ana and her first lover lie “listening intently to the sound of their souls”.
Still, it isn’t difficult to note the hand of time and mortality on the text. Curiously, what I take to be the effects of dementia do not amount to the repetitions and fogginess detectable in the last novels of Iris Murdoch and Terry Pratchett, both of whom wrote against the tide of mental decline. Rather, the novel is stripped of the endless, inventive discursions into folk-tale, backstory and verbal brio that characterise the best of Marquez. There is a moment, for example, when a “grandiloquent senator” arrives, and I endured a twist of sorrow that he is nothing but a passing mention, with no fabulous digression following in his wake.
And there is a kind of gaucherie in both expression and plot more commonly encountered in a debut: the denouement, though pleasingly strange, feels both rushed and unearned, and at times the prose lacks authority and style.
The opening contains a grammatical infelicity inconceivable in earlier works, and I was left puzzling over the source of the error, and whether McLean had in fact faithfully rendered a lapse on the part of the author — though the error is absent in the 1999 Grossman translation. The cumulative effect is oddly moving: it’s as if the book contained both Marquez the elder and Marquez the younger, with the perception and weary good humour of old age conveyed in the searching, tentative manner of the apprentice.
Nonetheless, the lasting impression is one of deep feeling, astutely observed and beautifully conveyed. Until August does nothing to enlarge the legend of Gabo; it does nothing to diminish it. Once, and with prophetic foresight, Marquez quoted Cicero: “No old man ever forgets where he has hidden his treasure.”