2024-03-11 02:39:23
In April, ten years will pass since the death of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Although the representative of the Latin American style called magical realism did not want it, a new book is being published on this occasion. Czech readers will also be waiting for it.
The writer’s sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, this week unveiled a 100-page prose novel entitled See You in August, which tells the story of a widow’s secret love life, in Madrid. Writing in Spanish, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature dabbled in writing the story until his death in 2014.
This Wednesday, on Márquez’s birthday, the novella will appear on bookstore shelves in Spanish under the title En agosto nos vemos. The English version will soon follow, and next week, among dozens of others, the Czech version, which will be published by Odeon in Blanka Stárková’s translation.
Cover of the Czech edition. | Photo: Odeon publishing house
The book is about Anne Magdalene, who takes a ferry to a Caribbean island every August to visit her mother’s grave. On that occasion, she always takes a break from her family life and has a one-night stand. “She is happily married and has absolutely no reason to break the world she created with her husband and children. Nevertheless, she sets out again to meet a random lover,” reads the annotation of the book, which the Czech publisher describes as “an anthem of life, a celebration of joy despite the passing of time and an ode to female desire”.
According to AFP, Márquez read the first chapter in public already in 1999 and later published excerpts in El País and The New Yorker. However, he was not satisfied with the rest of the text, so he put it aside and preferred to complete his memoirs, called Living so that I could tell. After them, he completed another prose called In Memory of My Sad Sluts, which received mixed reviews.
In 2003, he returned to Ana Magdalena’s story and even sent the manuscript to his literary agent. Seven years later, she informed her colleagues that despite her deteriorating health, Márquez was trying to finish the story, and asked them to help the writer.
Gonzalo García Barcha presents his father’s latest book See You in August. | Photo: Reuters
In the end, the novella had at least five versions, with the novelist editing the text, crossing out sentences, changing adjectives, and even dictating the edits towards the end of his life, when he could no longer write himself, until the last moments. Yet in the end he delivered a crushing verdict. Not long before his death, he declared that the book was worthless and should be destroyed. He didn’t have time to do it himself. He died in 2014, he was 87 years old.
The manuscript then traveled together with Márquez’s estate to the archives of the University of Texas in the US, where it was examined by literary scholars. In agreement with them, the heirs decided to piece together Márquez’s scattered chapters and fragments of a story that was rumored to have no end, with editor Cristóbal Pera.
Although the sons admit that the prose is not finished, they still reflect Márquez’s beautiful writing style and deep insight into the human soul. The resulting approximately one hundred pages were compiled from almost eight hundred pages of notes, while among the five existing versions they chose the one that Márquez himself preferred at one point. Nevertheless, they had to choose from conflicting versions of the text, for example, how old the protagonist is or whether one of her lovers has a mustache or not, the New York Times mentions.
“When we read the whole thing, we realized that the book is much better than we remembered it,” says Gonzalo García Barcha’s younger son. “We think that just as my father lost the ability to write in recent years, he may also have lost the ability to read and judge the quality of his own writing,” he adds.
In the last years of his life, Márquez struggled with memory lapses caused by dementia. He no longer recognized relatives or friends, and when he read his own book, he could not remember having written it, according to the New York Times.
Gabriel García Márquez was the most widely read Spanish author of the 20th century. | Photo: University of Texas Archives
According to them, the sons were afraid to publish the book, among other things, for fear of being accused of wanting to make money off their father after his death. They found the text interesting, for example, that it is Márquez’s first prose where the protagonist is a woman.
“For me, the most important thing is that now all Gab’s works have been published, there is nothing left. We have closed one circle,” adds Gonzalo García Barcha. Márquez, known to the Latin American world under the nickname Gabo, did not leave behind any other manuscripts. In the end, he always disposed of unfinished works – with one exception, namely the book We’ll See You in August.
The most widely read Spanish author of the 20th century, Gabriel García Márquez became famous for his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude from 1967. Parables about solitude, love or death mix reality with magic and alternate time planes. It tells the saga of the Buendí family from the fictional village of Macondo located in the South American jungle.
Over fifty million copies of this prose have been sold worldwide, of which ten million have recently been sold in China alone, El País calculated.
The American video library Netflix will launch a TV series based on One Hundred Years of Solitude this year. As long as he lived, Márquez refused offers to adapt. During his lifetime, however, the novels Love in the Time of Cholera, where one of the main roles was played by the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, or the Chronicle of the Announced Death were filmed.
Márquez used to be referred to as the main representative of the boom in Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s. His other books such as Autumn of the Patriarch or The General in his Labyrinth are also famous.
He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for novels and short stories in which he “combines fantasy and reality into a richly structured world of imagination, mirroring the life and conflicts of the continent”. Most recently, he published the novel In Memory of My Sad Curses.
Video: Trailer from the series One Hundred Years of Solitude
The TV series based on Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude will be released by Netflix this year. | Video: Netflix