2024-03-06 07:45:01
Ten years after his death, an unpublished work by the Nobel Prize winner for literature hit bookstores at the initiative of his sons.
A posthumous novel by Gabriel García Márquez is published this Wednesday March 6 in Spanish, a work which had become “indecipherable” for the Colombian Nobel Prize winner plagued by memory loss at the end of his life, according to his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo , who had to do “archaeological work” to bring together the fragments.
This unpublished short novel, We will see each other in August, is published as the tenth anniversary of the death on April 17, 2014 of the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, crowned with the Nobel Prize, approaches. of literature in 1982.
Dissatisfied with the novel
About fifteen years before her death, “Gabo” began writing this book which tells the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a woman who visits her mother’s grave every year in August on a Caribbean island. The protagonist takes advantage of her travels to leave aside her life of chastity and increases the number of erotic meetings with strangers.
In 1999, Gabriel García Márquez publicly read the first chapter, but refrained from publishing the rest of the work, which did not satisfy him, and contented himself with giving versions of the manuscript to those close to him.
Considering this work as nonsense and a “waste”, he finally abandoned writing it, explained Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha during a virtual press conference organized Tuesday March 5 from Spain.
A book “much better than we thought”
The “book became a little indecipherable” for the author in the last years of his life, marked by illness and memory loss, Rodrigo explained. By decision of his relatives, the manuscripts were kept at the Harry Ransom Center, a library at the University of Texas, in the United States.
The opinions of academics who read fragments of the work finally convinced the two brothers to bring together these tests in a posthumous book, published on the anniversary of the birth of their father, who would have been 97 years old on Wednesday.
“When we read the versions, we realized that the book was much better than we thought. We began to suspect that Gabo had lost the ability to write, but also the ability to read” and so ” the ability to judge” one’s own writings, Gonzalo explained.
A “a little scattered” but “complete” novel
Despite rumors that the novel had no ending, the writer’s children and beneficiaries claim that he had fully developed the story of Ana Magdalena Bach before dying.
“The novel was a little scattered among an unknown number of originals, but it was complete.” It was “a work of archeology” to put the parts together and come to an end, Gonzalo added.
Rodrigo assures him, there is no other hidden novel from the father of magical realism, so that We’ll See You in August is the “last survivor” of his literary universe. The Spanish version is published in several countries this Wednesday March 6. The French version will be released on March 13 by Grasset and the English version on March 20.
The most translated Spanish-language writer
Born on March 6, 1927 in the northern Colombian town of Aracataca, Gabriel García Márquez, journalist and writer, is the author of a long list of short stories and novels, such as Chronicle of a Death Foretold and A Shipwrecked Man’s Tale, which shook up Latin American literature.
According to the Cervantes Institute, he is the most translated Spanish-language writer since the beginning of the 21st century, ahead of the Chilean Isabel Allende, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, also a Nobel Prize winner. The Netflix platform will release this year a series inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude, its masterpiece.
#Publication #posthumous #García #Márquez #archaeological #work #sons