Hello and happy Sunday!
What a classic downer, and so effective in any conversation. But really now, this week has been particularly conducive to such thoughts given Gabriel García Márquez’s new novel, set to be published posthumously by his sons next week (March 12th, 2024).
Gabriel García Márquez’s last (lost) novel: what happens when an author dies?
Gabo, as he was known in the literary world, didn’t want this novel published. He struggled to give it shape, to make it work. He reportedly rewrote the material that he left behind five times, and he left specific instructions that no one publish it: García Márquez himself told his sons, knowing that he was losing his memory to dementia, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”
After setting it aside for years, the sons thought again and decided that, though it is "not, of course, as polished as his greatest books", and despite its "rough patches", they should "betray" their father by giving it to the world.
The Guardian reports:
Until August, written when the author had dementia, comes a decade after his death, on what would have been his 97th birthday. It has been described by his sons as “the fruits of one last effort to carry on creating against all odds”, and tells the story of a woman who makes a yearly pilgrimage to her mother’s grave on a Caribbean island, a trip that becomes dominated by a series of chance sexual encounters.
In the face of increasing memory loss, García Márquez – known as “Gabo” – lost confidence in the work before his death, and asked for its destruction. Until now, the manuscript has been available to scholars at the writer’s archive in the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, but recently the author’s sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha made the decision to publish it, judging it to be far better than their father believed. “In an act of betrayal,” they write in their introduction to the novel, “we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations. If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us. In that we trust.”
The publication of Until August is being met with much excitement. The novelist Colum McCann said:
“What a joy it is to think that there are still things to discover in the world. I would walk 500 miles to get to a new Márquez book. It’s like discovering ice at the end of a long journey. Márquez is both beloved and necessary, a rare combination in the literary world. I remember my first experience of Márquez when I read his short story The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. Suddenly things were just entirely new. He was cleaving open the language for me. Of course, every time you enter a Márquez book, there will be something new, even if you have read it four or five times. But to come upon a thing for the first time is a rare treat.”
One of Gabo’s sons goes on in his justification of the decision saying:
(…) it was “hard to go against the grain” of his father’s wishes, but insisted that there were “plenty of examples in the history of literature of people who are requested to destroy manuscripts, and then they turn out to be important items in literature. For me personally, it’s a relief in the sense that this is actually the last piece Gabo wrote. I feel that his complete works would be unfinished if this wasn’t published. There are no other novels hiding around in Gabo’s papers.”
The posthumous release of literary works is a common occurrence and often sparks controversy. A similar case to that of García Márquez is seen in the actions of Vladimir Nabokov's son Dmitri, who decided to publish his father's last work, The Original of Laura, a manuscript on index cards which he had stipulated should be destroyed posthumously, over three decades after Nabokov's passing. During this time, the manuscript had been stored in a Swiss bank vault as Dmitri grappled with his father's directive to destroy any unpublished writings, while also considering that his mother had once stopped Nabokov from discarding the manuscript of Lolita.
In more recent times, additional instances have involved the writings of David Foster Wallace, Roberto Bolaño, and Stieg Larsson, known for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, who passed away unexpectedly at 50. Following Larsson's passing, his publishers enlisted David Lagercrantz and Karin Smirnoff to continue the Millennium series. One particularly notable case is that of Harper Lee, whose unpublished work Go Set a Watchman was released in 2015, shortly before her death, amidst allegations that the author had been coerced into its publication.
One critic of the decision to publish Until August posthumously is Miranda France, the consultant editor for Spain, Portugal, and Latin America for the Times Literary Supplement. On an initial reading, she noticed that there was a comparative impoverishment in García Márquez’s customarily rich vocabulary, and said she found the experience poignant: “There are elements of what was there before, but I found that very sad because I felt that the fuller narrative was missing.” The danger, she feels, is that “not only does it not really add, but it might actually slightly detract” from García Márquez’s otherwise “terrific” body of work.
When García Márquez's sons were young, their father permitted them to assist him in discarding drafts of his unfinished works that he deemed unnecessary; described by his editors and publishers as a perfectionist, who meticulously oversaw every alteration in punctuation and language in his manuscripts before sharing them with his extensive and enthusiastic audience. Now, that same readership will be able to assess whether his last creative work was deserving of being made public.
Márquez, who died in 2014, remains a colossus, especially in Spain. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) sold an astonishing 50 million copies and made its author a rock star. At the height of his fame, one critic declared that this founding document of magical realism was “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the human race”.
Subsequently, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), with many subsequent novels and novellas, confirmed him both as a writer who dominated a literary boom that includes Cortazar, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa and as “the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes” (Carlos Fuentes). After 1982, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Márquez continued to explore themes of love and death, loss and nostalgia, but his best work was done, The Independent reports.
In 1999, he was diagnosed with cancer, a condition which morphed into dementia. In his final years, the novelist of memory and solitude became the prisoner of failing powers. Obsessive about his work, as he’d always been, he devoted himself to a project that began as We’ll Meet in August and finally ended with this novella, Until August.
What posthumous control can the author exercise over his or her work? This hoary question dates to Virgil, who asked that the unfinished Aeneid be destroyed. (The emperor Augustus intervened on behalf of posterity.)
The issue recurred when Franz Kafka wanted his friend Max Brod to burn a collection of manuscripts which included both The Trial and The Castle. (Brod found reasons to ignore this request.)
How different would the literary world of today be without these last two pieces of text? Would it have made my German lit colleagues happier, considering the angst I saw them experience during the time they studied Kafka?
To partly answer a question I was asked a few weeks ago and which I plan to address at some point in the Grapevine1, The Trial is among the books that changed my outlook on the world and life in general, and I can’t imagine what literature today would be without its influence.
What books would you put on your list that changed or formed you as a person?
Dana’s Book Club April book
I am happy to report that we are finally reading a book that adheres to the requests of the wider Book Club membership: a standalone novel that is under 300 pages.
Well, the standalone part is subjective, since Goodreads reports it as part of a series.
This classic The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith is a psychological thriller, a gripping tale of deception, manipulation, and moral ambiguity that I expect will keep our book club members on the edge of their seats. The complex character of Tom Ripley, a charming yet sociopathic protagonist, should provide ample material for thought-provoking discussions on morality, identity, and the consequences of our actions. Highsmith's masterful storytelling and skilful character development should make for a riveting exploration of human nature and the darker aspects of the human psyche. I have come across the title so many times in my life that the fact that I haven’t read it is still an error I am looking forward to correcting.
What are the 10 books that shaped you as a person or changed your view of the world?
While I was thinking of my list of books, I've noticed that most of them were read in my childhood, teenage years and beginning of adult life. Those were the most impactul on my personality. What came afterwards, although they were better books, they've just shaped the type of reader I am today, one that indulges in all kind of styles and subjects.