Márquez’s last book is an unsatisfying goodbye

By Michael Greenberg

Billed as a “rediscovered” novel, “Until August” is likely to be the last published book of fiction by the Colombian master and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It would be hard to imagine a more unsatisfying goodbye from the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), the book that threw open the doors of Latin American literature with no less force than Boccaccio’s “Decameron” did for 14th-century Italy. “Until August,” nimbly translated by Anne McLean, is a microscopic story, its contents hardly sufficient for it to be called a novella, much less a finished novel. Reading it may provoke unhealthy levels of frustration in those familiar with García Márquez’s most indelible creations.

Readers’ inevitable disappointment with “Until August” may be directed partly at García Márquez’s two sons and literary executors, who permitted its publication even though their father had made his wishes clear. “This book doesn’t work,” he told them. “It must be destroyed.” He finished his fifth, and final, draft in late 2004, when he was 77, around the time his memory commenced the merciless process of disappearing.

His decline then might not have been obvious to acquaintances, but it seems to have been steep enough to prevent him from holding together the kind of imagined world that the writing of fiction demands. “Life is not what one lives, but what one remembers,” goes the epigraph to his memoir “Living to Tell the Tale” (2002). And to his sons he said: “Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.”

Now, 10 years after his death, his executors appear to have overrated the story’s value, possibly as a result of sentimental admiration for their father. In a brief preface they strike a note of doubt, calling “Until August” “the fruit of one last effort to carry on creating against all odds.” They concede that it is not “as polished as his greatest books,” but excuse their “act of betrayal” with the explanation “that the fading faculties that kept him from finishing the book also kept him from realising how good it was.” None of his editors or longtime publishers appears to have thought of protecting him or acknowledging the manuscript’s vapidity.

What is most jarring is that the story has all the hallmarks of García Márquez; despite its deficiencies, the writing is unmistakably his. At its centre is Ana Magdalena Bach, who is a virgin when she marries and remains contentedly faithful to her husband until, at 46, she embarks on a series of explosive one-night stands, a new one each year. She meets the men, all of them strangers, during solo visits to the Caribbean island where her mother is buried. Without fail, every August 16 she lays a bouquet of fresh gladioli on her mother’s grave, clears the weeds that have sprung up around the stone and quickly fills her mother in on the latest family news. Then she gets down to the serious business of finding a partner until morning, when a ferry will take her back to the mainland.

If you agree that the dead have no rights, as both natural and written laws stipulate, then you may argue that by not destroying the drafts of “Until August” when he had the chance, the author’s wishes have been rendered irrelevant. This oversight on García Márquez’s part does seem unusual. He was an assiduous shaper of his public image, clothing himself in an armour of apocrypha, while destroying most of the written traces of his private life “and even,” according to his biographer Gerald Martin, “his professional literary activity.” The letters he wrote to his wife, Mercedes Barcha, during their courtship amounted to 650 pages. A few weeks after they married, García Márquez, worried that “someone might get hold of them,” persuaded her to burn the letters, though he was still unknown. One speculates that he simply forgot to get rid of the drafts of “Until August” he had compiled.

Reading “Until August” is a bit like watching a great dancer, well past his prime, marking his ineradicable elegance in a few moves he can neither develop nor sustain. This is most keenly felt in the second half, when the author’s command of his subject slips and the story rushes to its hackneyed conclusion. One can almost pinpoint the place where the thread attaching author to subject unravels, as he repeats tropes and images, and the generation of new material falls beyond his grasp.

García Márquez’s work has survived legions of imitators who have misunderstood magic realism as a stylistic mannerism rather than the means to a sharper, less omniscient reality. Much of what is thought of as “magical” in his novels reflects life as his characters believed it to be in the Caribbean towns he so vividly described. Now, his literary guardians have put in front of the world the indignity of García Márquez imitating himself. Luckily, his intelligence and exceptional use of language have ensured that his best work remains undiminished. If you’re unfamiliar with that work, a feast of originality and sheer inventiveness awaits you. The value of “Until August” may ultimately be to give readers the chance to mourn anew the passing of a beloved writer. The New York Times