Book title: Until August
ISBN: 9781039055735
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
By: Medecci Lineil
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014), Nobel Laureate for Literature 1982
“MEMORY was my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.”
Gabriel García Márquez or simply Gabo to his fans, began to write Until August toward the end of his life.
It was intended to be part of a much longer work, cut short by García Márquez’s battle with dementia.
His final verdict was absolute: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”
García Márquez left behind five versions of the novel.
The newly published version — released on March 6 in Spanish and March 12 in English — stems primarily from two texts:
“Version five, dated July 5, 2004,” which Cristóbal Pera describes as García Márquez’s favourite of the five in the editor’s note of the novel’s Spanish edition, and a digital document of all alternate passages and scenes that had not made the cut.
Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha — García Márquez’s sons — waited ten years after their father’s death before revisiting the text.
“Judging the book to be much better than we remembered it,” they wrote in the preface, “another possibility occurred to us:
that the fading faculties that kept him from finishing the book also kept him from realising how good it was.”
Delving into the novel, I was astonished to find this story — the real one — refracted around every corner.
Ana Magdalena Bach (whose name is one “n” short of that of Johann Sebastian Bach’s wife, Anna Magdalena Bach) returns to an indeterminate tropical island every August.
Her middle name, Magdalena, is a nod to the river that winds its way through northern Colombia — and through the heart of García Márquez’s life and stories.
It is the river he used to travel on his way to school, the one that Simón Bolívar sails in the early chapters of García Márquez’s novel The General In His Labyrinth, and on which the elderly lovers in Love in the Time of Cholera finally unite after decades apart.
One of the inspirations for that book was Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which Ana reads on one of her visits to the island.
I like to think the island sits somewhere off the Colombian coast somewhere near Barranquilla, where García Márquez spent part of his life and which provides the setting for much of his fiction.
Every August, Ana leaves her family in Bogotá to come and clean the grave and leave a bunch of gladioli, a duty she has performed for eight years when the novel begins.
It’s where her mother asked to be buried; Ana doesn’t know why.
She’s married — happily, mostly.
But every year on the island, she makes a new friend, just for a single evening.
Each affair winds up, climaxes, and eventually ends in disappointment.
A day is soured when the friend leaves her a 20-dollar bill.
Years later, Ana spots another friend on the news, wanted as a pimp, perhaps a murderer.
Her trips to the island are an effort to discover untold truths about her late mother, to communicate with the dead.
This is effectively what Until August is: A previously untold story emerging from the past, a window into a dead parent.
The story of the novel is also the story of its publication.
García Márquez deftly blends curiosity and desire until they become one and the same.
Until August suggests that the pursuit of ‘connection’ is not so different from the pursuit for knowledge — and that they are both ultimately expressions of love.
On the island, between fragmented affairs, Ana reads a number of structurally fragmented crisis works: Dracula (epistolary by Bram Stoker), The Martian Chronicles (a so-called “fix-up” novel by Ray Bradbury), A Journal of the Plague Year (journal).
The title Until August focuses on the before, the gaps in the year preceding visits to the island, but also Ana’s life before her mother’s death.
García Márquez inserts whole worlds into these gaps, leaving threads of other stories in Ana’s wake.
We are reminded of the world existing within people coming and going, music floating into the foreground, married couples taking refuge in motel rooms, flowers on gravestones, and bishops who found solace in hotels.
García Márquez said that Until August should be destroyed.
But he didn’t destroy it.
Opening the novel felt like divulging a secret, as if I were doing something I shouldn’t.
But it’s a kind of infidelity that stems from love.
“In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations,” his sons wrote in the preface.
“If they are delighted, it’s possible that Gabo might forgive us.”
I’ve read the 124-page novel twice, and each time, it’s the same.
Goosebumps. A deep sigh of relief.
It’s like the story knows exactly how to leave you both shaken and comforted.
To call it an unpublished masterpiece may be a little strong — but it’s still very good.
It’s still Gabriel García Márquez — Nobel laureate and Colombian national hero who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, the bible of magic realism — a novel that has sold 50 million copies since 1967 and which changed Latin American and world literature — is not someone whose unpublished work stays unpublished.
Near the end of the novel, Ana begins to realise that her life on the island is not entirely her own.
“She did not feel sad but rather encouraged by the realisation that the miracle of her life was to have continued that of her dead mother.”
This is what stories do — they continue in those left over after their germination has faded away into the past.
We are left to wonder what could have been written if García Márquez had had time to weave something out of the still-hanging threads.
