The new García Márquez is best read once

As pitches to the reader go, there aren’t many worse than “the author didn’t think you should read this”. That author is Gabriel García Márquez, and the book is Until August, which he wrote in the last 15 years of his life, when he was suffering from dementia. It has just been published by his sons—against his dying wishes.

García Márquez is the author I most look forward to reading, a detail only slightly attributable to having a Colombian father. Few writers are as endearing, as hypnotic or as dryly humorous as García Márquez—and none can combine these qualities so well in a single sentence. So when the rumours of a “lost” text were confirmed last year, I was desperate to read the novella the finest Spanish-language writer since Cervantes had said “doesn’t work” and “must be destroyed”.

With García Márquez, normal logic doesn’t apply. Despite the challenges of its creation, I wondered whether Until August could be spectacular; and whether his dying wish was simply a ruse to emulate his hero, Franz Kafka, who seemed to prefer destroying his works to publishing them. On the other hand, the novella—which began life as several short stories—had the potential to feel like a patchwork. Add in García Márquez’s fading faculties—he once told his son Rodrigo, “Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it”—and it would have been natural to suspect the seams would tear apart.

For me, they didn’t—on first reading.

Spread across four years, the novella describes a few days in the life of a late fortysomething woman, Ana Magdalena Bach. As usual for García Márquez, the tale takes place in the Colombian Caribbean—this time on an island suffering a tourism boom. Ana Magdalena visits once a year to lay gladioli on her beloved mother’s grave. One year, despite a fulfilled marital and familial life, she initiates an affair. She has, shall we say, a great time; but the fling sours the following morning when the only trace of the man is a $20 bill. The discovery of the cash is the novella’s “inciting incident”, and the cue for some classic García Márquez dry humour: “She did not know whether to frame it as a trophy or tear it to shreds to exorcise the indignity. The only thing that seemed indecent was to spend it.”

On my first reading, I passed two trance-like hours in the author’s wonderful company. It is the voice, that warm voice that embraces the epic, the folky, the satirical and the surreal, and that coaxes you into reading with feeling rather than judgement.

Part of me wishes I hadn’t re-read it. My nostalgia at returning to García Márquez had repelled the novella’s shortcomings. The second time—reading for the motifs, the word choices and the technique—it was harder to show leniency to the text’s roughness. His language is diluted (I only had to look up two words) and some of the phrases are poor: “she felt good listening to the music” or “very stylishly poured her a shot”. García Márquez wrote five iterations of the novella, yet these feel like the to-be-revised scribbles of a first draft.

On several occasions, the unruliness of the text is accompanied by a male gaze. For instance, García Márquez offhandedly labels Ana Magdalena’s daughter Micaela—a fleeting yet potentially brilliant character (she is a party animal who wants to become a nun)—“a charming hothead”. He describes Ana Magdalena’s skin as having “the texture of molasses”. How can skin have the texture of molasses?

Ana Magdalena is independent and indomitable, and García Márquez gives her some complexity (she is comfortable wearing a monogrammed cotton shirt or an ecru linen suit, but also a pair of very worn trainers). But although she has total agency, García Márquez is almost exclusively interested in her family ties and her love life. We don’t know her occupation, even though we are told the professions of the secondary, male characters (in a brilliant line, one of her lovers, post-coital, pretends he is a bishop).

By insisting on being buried on the island, Ana Magdalena’s unnamed mother is the instigator of the story. Symbolically, this grants her the creative power she renounced in life (the narrator laments that, despite her talents, “she never wanted to be anything more” than a school teacher). The irony is that García Márquez’s narrow biographic focus denies daughter and granddaughter the chance to become developed characters. Ana Magdalena and Micaela could have been so much more. So could this novella.

García Márquez is a writer uniquely admired among critics and beloved by readers. People who have never met him call him “Gabo”. No one calls Joyce “Sunny Jim”. This novella is well short of his best work, but that wry voice (smoothly translated by Anne McLean) makes it enjoyable. Just don’t read it too closely—or twice.