REVIEW: Reading Gabriel Garcial Marquez, Postumously

Until August

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anne McLean (Translator)

Knopf 144 pp.

By Jim Swearingen

When Patrick Hemingway edited and published True at First Light, in 1999, posthumously and against his father’s wishes, the critics did not fawn. Such post-mortem publications often lack polish and painstaking craftsmanship precisely because the original author never finished them. These books are typically clumsy facsimiles of what made us love an author’s work in the first place and, as such, may embarrass the reader and the critic. They brush the itch without scratching it. Yet, who would not jump at more pages from a favorite writer, though we might fear disappointment.

This deficiency applies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s posthumously published novel, Until August, which Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha have released against their father’s wishes. Marquez, who was suffering from advanced dementia as he worked on it, instructed that the book be destroyed, an act he evidently did not have the will, nor the wherewithal to commit. Neither did his sons.

Typically, opening up a new Marquez novel entails a roll of uncommonly fine dice. The reader may dive into an epic narrative encompassing centuries of war and dissolution, or delve into the mind of a washed-up hero, struggling to hold onto political relevance, or even find a quasi-journalistic account of social upheaval in his native Columbia. Whichever particular invention one finds, Marquez’s tales of vanity, seduction, cruelty, and fate guided by accident splash across the pages like paint across a Jackson Pollock canvas. His vast compositions convey an incorrigible humanity stumbling over itself in pursuit of lasting fulfillment while mortality and nature rapidly swallow it up. Political power, stately pomp, sexual prowess, marital bliss, and innocent youth all fade, or are devoured.

But Until August begs for more time with the master’s honing chisel. This novel is an intriguing beginning of what his editor, Cristobal Pera, calls “an original theme [Marquez] had not tackled previously in his work.” The author envisioned it as a collection of short stories united by a common female protagonist and adulterous theme rather than the sort of fantastical generational narrative in 100 Years of Solitude or Autumn of the Patriarch.

Every August 16th, Ana Magdalena Bach visits a poor island where her mother is buried, to lay a bouquet of gladioli on the grave. Each year, she attempts to patronize the same florist, the same taxi driver, and the same hotel. And every year, she follows up her annual cemetery tribute with a spontaneous sexual tryst with a different man. In the first chapter, which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1999, she picks up a traveling salesman in a bar. In subsequent years, as the island becomes more prosperous and overcrowded, she continues to pursue her carnal desires with a series of smarmy, intoxicated mashers in the same nearly predatory fashion that many of Marquez’s male characters do in his other works.

Whether motivated by the thrill of the hunt, the titillation of infidelity, or a resentful vengeance against her suspiciously flirtatious husband is never clear. Human causation in Marquez’s work always defies neat, linear analysis. It recalls the film Same Time, Next Year, itself a series of brief vignettes, about an adulterous couple who, somewhat inexplicably, meet annually at the same inn, on the same weekend, to continue a sometimes carnal, sometimes platonic affair over decades.

Marquez often depicts an unrestrained eroticism that some American readers find off-putting. Accusations of misogyny and chauvinism stalk his works. In a country where sexuality is still neatly siloed and classified, if only with abbreviations and acronyms, his unapologetically fiery descriptions defy America’s prurient–while-Puritanical relationship with sex, buttressed with so many social regulations and ideological taboos. Still feeling shame at our kinks and peccadillos, how could we not bristle at the easy way he explores unrepentant lust and disenchantment, followed inevitably by more lust?

Marquez has always been a faithful reporter of what humans do and how they act without censorious commentary. His attention to dress, style, and the detailed movements of eyes and fingers broadcast hunger and pathos, the tension between venery and propriety. Ana displays a trolling sexuality that Marquez more often depicts in his male protagonists. The very title Until August suggests the anticipation of her annual trysts, rather than the doleful adventures themselves.

This novel still bears traces of the Maestro’s hand: the grails that elude us, the intoxicating opportunities that end in failure and despair, the shock of recognition when a previous generation’s secrets parallel our own; and always, the shadow of unmerciful poverty and its grotesques.

A love affair with an author’s life’s work may start with the clumsy fumblings in the backseat of his early stories, evolving into a sublime literary gratification, only to end with affectionate nostalgia in the twilight of what was. Hemingway’s son, and Marquez’s sons, and the numerous postpartum publishers of their parents’ final work have not done wrong in sharing them with us. An agitated perfectionism need not deprive us of a last few pages with our old literary flames. However imperfect, we are grateful to have them.