Ten years after his death, Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez returns to bookstores with a posthumous novel.
“We will see each other in August” comes out Wednesday March 6, for the moment in Spanish.
It will be published by Grasset in French on March 13.
This work had become “indecipherable” for the Nobel Prize winner, plagued by memory loss at the end of his life, according to his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
The latter had to do “archaeological work” to bring together the fragments.
The latest novel by Gabriel García Márquez is on sale, possibly the newest novel in 2024. pic.twitter.com/wEqY06CoK4
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This unpublished short novel is published as the tenth anniversary of the death on April 17, 2014 of the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of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 for Literature in 1982.
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.
Nonsense and a “waste”
About fifteen years before her death, "Gabo" had started 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 Garcia Marquez publicly read the first chapter, but refrained from publishing the rest of the work, which did not satisfy him.
The author simply gave 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 Garcia Barcha during a virtual press conference organized Tuesday from Spain.
At the decision of his relatives, the manuscripts were kept at the Harry Ransom Center, a library at the University of Texas, in the United States.
A “dispersed” but “complete” novel
The opinions of academics who read fragments of the work finally convinced the two brothers to bring these tests together in a posthumous book.
"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.
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 in an unknown number of originals, but it was complete."
It was "archaeological work" 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 will see each other in August" is the "last survivor" of his literary universe.
After the Spanish and French, the English version is expected on March 20.
With AFP
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