When Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014, a decade had passed since he last published a work of fiction. So the appearance of Until August, billed as “the lost novel”, at least has symmetry in its favour. It was a book the author began in the 1990s but, suffering from Alzheimer’s, couldn’t ever finish to his satisfaction. Its existence was mentioned at the time of his death, but years passed before his sons excavated it from his papers. At the end of last year, its publication was announced, to a fanfare of publicity and anticipation.
There was an inevitability to the announcement. García Márquez, Nobel laureate and Colombian national hero, the man who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, the bible of magic realism — a novel that has sold 50mn copies since 1967 and which changed Latin American and world literature — is not someone whose unpublished work stays unpublished.
But should it have? Translated by Anne McLean, the book is, if we are as generous with our terms as the marketing department at Viking, his UK publishers, García Márquez’s seventh novel. Or, more sensibly, it’s his fifth and final novella. It tells a slight story about a series of ritual visits made by a middle-aged woman called Ana Magdalena Bach to her mother’s grave in a rundown cemetery on an unnamed tropical island, which we can assume lies 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 book begins. This time, however, something unexpected occurs. Having a drink after dinner, she meets a man; surprising herself, she invites him to her room.
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Their night of passion inaugurates a new tradition: each year, when Ana makes her island pilgrimage, she will take a new lover. This is out of character — she was a virgin when she married, 27 years before — and although she tries to compartmentalise, her affairs begin to affect her home life.
Now that she has been unfaithful, she recognises the clues and realises her husband, a successful orchestral conductor, has been cheating on her for years. It’s the neatest bit of psychology in the book, displaying some of García Márquez’s wonderful gift for characterisation.
That Ana Magdalena Bach shares her name with JS Bach’s second wife is only addressed with a passing reference to her coming from a musical family, but her middle name is that of a river that runs through both northern Colombia and García Márquez’s life and work.
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.
Spotting these nods to García Márquez’s back catalogue is fun, but is it enough? Until August offers momentary pleasures, but is obviously unfinished, and certain sentences make you understand why he wanted to suppress it.
Consider this train wreck of cliché and repetition: “She did not hesitate for an instant. And she was not wrong: it was an unforgettable night. Much less forgettable than Ana Magdalena Bach could have imagined”. García Márquez, a writer of great fluency and structural sophistication, would never have wanted lines like these to leave his desk; the existence in his archive of at least five drafts of the book is the record of his failure to solve its problems.
As for Ana, she never really comes to life, and it doesn’t take long before García Márquez commits the great faux pas of a male author writing a female character by having her regard her own figure: “After she finished drying off she looked in the mirror and appraised her breasts, still round and high in spite of two pregnancies.”
When she rolls deodorant on to her “smooth shaven underarms”, or later, bafflingly, pats her “pert breasts” after receiving a compliment, we feel a male author gazing at his creation rather than inhabiting her.
It would be easier to accept Until August’s faults if García Márquez hadn’t himself considered it the effort of a failing mind. The apologia his sons contribute at the beginning of the book is unconvincing, and their final excuse is particularly hard to swallow: “Judging the book to be much better than we remembered it, another possibility occurred to us: that the fading faculties that kept him from finishing the book also kept him from realizing how good it was.” Someone should have dissuaded them from this line of argument.
It’s worth mentioning, too, that this “lost novel” was never really lost. As news reports at the time of García Márquez’s death made plain — underscored by the editor Cristóbal Pera’s afterword — it was always known about, and a section first appeared as the story “Meeting in August” in the New Yorker back in 1999.
Parts of the work clearly pleased García Márquez, but, like the weed-chocked grave of Ana’s mother, the book as a whole represents little more than a melancholy marker of the depletion of his ability.
In their introduction, García Márquez’s sons don’t shy away from quoting his final judgment that the book “doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” In One Hundred Years of Solitude — a book its author never wanted filmed but that is now forthcoming from Netflix — Colonel Aureliano Buendía requests that his poems be burnt.
Members of his family twice refuse to do so, even when they say they will. Eventually he learns his lesson and burns them himself.
Until August: The Lost Novel by Gabriel García Márquez Viking £16.99/Knopf $22, 144 pages
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