Towards the end of his life, with his memory cut off, Gabriel García Márquez struggled to finish a novel about the secret sex life of a married middle-aged woman. He tried at least five versions and tinkered with the text for years, cutting sentences, writing in the margins, changing adjectives, dictating notes to his assistant. Eventually, he relented, and issued a final, devastating judgment.
“He told me directly that the novel had to be destroyed,” said Gonzalo García Barcha, the author’s younger son.
When García Márquez died in 2014, many drafts, notes and chapter fragments of the novel were kept in his archives in Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The story remained there, spread over 769 pages, largely unread and forgotten — until Garcia Marquez’s children decided to disobey their father’s wishes.
Now, a decade after his death, his last novel, titled “Until August,” will be published this month, with a global release in nearly 30 countries. The narrative centers on a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to a Caribbean island every August to visit her mother’s grave. On these lonely journeys, once freed from her husband and family, she finds a new lover each time.
The novel adds an unexpected coda to the life and work of García Márquez, a literary giant and Nobel laureate, and is likely to provoke questions about how literary estates and publishers should navigate posthumous releases. contradicting a writer’s directives.
Literary history is replete with examples of famous works that would not exist if executors and heirs ignored the wishes of the authors. On his deathbed, the poet Virgil requested that the manuscript of his epic poem “The Aeneid” be destroyed, according to classical lore. When Franz Kafka was seriously ill from tuberculosis, he ordered his friend and executor, Max Brod, to burn all his work. Brod betrayed him, delivering surrealist masterpieces like “The Trial,” “The Castle” and “Amerika.” Vladimir Nabokov ordered his family to destroy his last novel, “The Original of Laura,” but more than 30 years after the author’s death, his son released the unfinished text, which Nabokov drew on index card.
In some posthumous works, the writer’s intentions for the text are unclear, leading scholars and readers to wonder how complete it is, and how much latitude editors took with the manuscript. Occasionally, there are estates and heirs is criticized for tarnishing an author’s legacy by releasing inferior or unfinished works to squeeze the last bit of intellectual property from a literary name brand.
For García Márquez’s children, the question of what to do with “Until August” is complicated by their father’s conflicting assessments. For a while, he worked hard on the manuscript, and at one point sent a draft to his literary agent. It wasn’t until he was suffering from severe memory loss from dementia that he decided it wasn’t enough.
By 2012, he no longer recognized even close friends and family — with the few exceptions being his wife, Mercedes Barcha, his children said. He tried to continue the conversation. From time to time he would pick up one of his books and read it, not recognizing the prose as his own.
He confided to his family that he felt unsettled as an artist without his memory, which was his greatest source of material. Without memory, “nothing,” he told them. In that fractured state, he began to doubt the quality of his novel.
“Gabo lost the ability to judge the book,” said Rodrigo García, the eldest of his two children. “He couldn’t follow the plot anymore, maybe.”
Rereading it years after his death, his children felt that García Márquez might have judged himself too harshly. “It’s better than we remembered,” García said.
His sons acknowledge that “Until August” is not among García Márquez’s masterpieces, and fear that some may dismiss the publication as a cynical effort to make more money from their father’s legacy.
“Of course we’re worried about being seen as greedy,” García said.
Unlike his sprawling, lush works of magical realism — epics like “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which have sold some 50 million copies — “Until August ” is moderate in scope. The English-language edition, which appeared on March 12 and was translated by Anne McLean, runs to just 107 pages.
The brothers argue that it is an important addition to García Márquez’s body of work, in part because it reveals a new side of him. For the first time, she directs a narrative with a female protagonist, telling an intimate story about a woman in her late 40s who, after nearly 30 years of marriage, begins to seek freedom and self-fulfillment through of forbidden love affairs.
They also tried to change the text as little as possible, and decided not to patch up the prose or add any phrases that did not come directly from García Márquez’s drafts or notes.
However, some readers and critics may question their choice to release a work that García Márquez himself considered incomplete, potentially adding a disappointing footnote to a towering legacy.
In his native Colombia, where García Márquez’s face appears on the money and expectations for the book are high, many in literary circles are eager for anything new by García Márquez, however unpolished. However, some are wary of the way the novel is marketed.
“They don’t offer it to you as a manuscript, as an unfinished work, they offer you García Márquez’s last novel,” said Colombian writer and journalist Juan Mosquera. “I don’t believe in the grandiloquence we give here. I think it is what it is – a great commercial moment for the García Márquez signature and brand.”
Colombian novelist Héctor Abad said he was skeptical about publication at first, but changed his mind when he read an advance copy.
“I fear that it might be an act of commercial opportunism, and no, it’s quite the opposite,” Abad, who will appear at an event celebrating the novel in Barcelona, said in an email. “All the virtues that made the best García Márquez great are also present here.”
No doubt García Márquez at some point felt that the novel was worth publishing. In 1999, he read excerpts at a public appearance with the novelist José Saramago in Madrid. Excerpts from the story were later published in Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, and in The New Yorker. She put the project aside to finish her memoir and published another novel, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” which garnered mixed reviews. He started it in earnest again in 2003, and a year later, he sent the manuscript to his agent, the late Carmen Balcells.
In the summer of 2010, Balcells called Cristóbal Pera, an editor with whom García Márquez had worked on his memoir. He said that García Márquez, then in his 80s, was trying to finish a novel, and asked Pera to help him. García Márquez was very guarded about his work in progress, but after a few months, he allowed Pera to read a few chapters of the novel, and seemed excited about it, Pera recalled. Almost a year later, his memory failing, the author struggled to understand the narrative, but continued to write notes in the margins of the manuscript.
“It’s therapeutic for him, because he can still do something with a pen and paper,” Pera said. “But he won’t finish.”
When Pera gently persuaded García Márquez to publish the book, the author strongly opposed it. “He said, at this point in my life, I don’t need to publish anything else,” Pera recalled.
After his death at the age of 87, various versions of “Until August” were kept in the archives of the Ransom Center.
Two years ago, García Márquez’s children decided to revisit the text. The novel is messy in places, with some contradictions and repetitions, they say, but it feels complete, if not polished. It has flashes of his lyricism, such as a scene where Ana, about to confess her infidelity at her mother’s grave, clutches her heart “in a fist.”
When the brothers decided to publish the novel, they faced a conundrum. García Márquez left at least five versions in various stages of completion. But he gave a clue as to which one he prefers.
“One of the folders he kept had ‘Gran OK final’ on the front of it,” García Barcha said.
“That was before he decided it wasn’t OK,” his brother added.
Last year, when they asked Pera to edit the novel, he started working from the fifth version, dated July 2004 — the one marked “Gran OK final.” He also used other versions, and from a digital document compiled by García Márquez’s assistant, Mónica Alonso, with various notes and changes that the author wanted to make. Often, Pera is faced with competing versions of a sentence or phrase — one typed, the other written by hand in the margins.
Pera tried to correct inconsistencies and contradictions, such as the age of the main character — García Márquez doubted whether he was middle-aged or closer to old — and the presence, or absence, of a mustache in one of her lovers.
In building the most coherent version they could, Pera and the brothers made one rule: They wouldn’t add a word that wasn’t from García Márquez’s notes or different versions, they said.
As for the fate of any other unpublished works of García Márquez, his children say that this is not an issue: There is nothing else. Throughout his life, García Márquez regularly destroyed older versions of published books and unfinished manuscripts because he did not want them to be reviewed later.
That was among the reasons they decided to publish “Until August,” they said.
“Once this book is released, we will publish all of Gabo’s work,” said García Barcha. “There’s nothing else in the drawer.”
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.
