It’s the stuff of literary dreams: a new “lost” novel from Gabriel García Márquez, the celebrated Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), will be published in English next week.
Metaphorically shoved to the back of Márquez’s desk drawer, Until August was the Nobel Prize-winning author’s last work. The writer was grappling with dementia while writing the novel, and though he initially signed off the book, one of Márquez’s last wishes was for it to remain unpublished.
And so the story was duly locked away with Márquez’s other papers, destined to never be read. But years passed, and Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha began to reconsider “the book’s exceptional qualities”.
“Until August was the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds,” they said. “Reading it once again almost ten years after his death, we discovered that the text had many highly enjoyable merits and nothing that prevents us from delighting in the most outstanding aspects of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, his poetic language, his captivating storytelling, his understanding of humankind and his affection for our experiences and misadventures, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work.”
And so, happily for Márquez’s millions of fans, exactly a decade after their father’s death, they have decided to published the finished manuscript: Until August becomes available today in Spain (March 6, the late author’s birthday) and in the UK on Tuesday (March 12) – a moment that has been described as “one of the literary events of the year”.
A sensual exploration of freedom and longing, it’s the story of a married woman who marks every anniversary of her mother’s death by having a one night stand with a stranger. Translated by award-winning Canadian translator Anne McLean, it has been described by critics as “a profound study of desire and womanhood” and “one final tale of ecstatic love”.
Some reviewers have been slightly less complimentary, characterising the work as inconsistent. But most have admitted that it remains a treat to read Márquez, even if below par: “Until August is a sketch, as blurry and flawed as sketches generally are, but a sketch from a master is welcome,” said one newspaper, summing up the sentiments.
The world’s most-translated Spanish-language author, and one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, Márquez (1927-2014) wrote dozens of novels, short stories, novellas and non-fiction works. His most-loved works remain One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera , both moving and utterly extraordinary meditations on love, politics, family and human existence.
Known for using magical realism in his novels, Márquez work has been described as “required reading for the entire human race”.
