“This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” Not a one-star rant from the bowels of Amazon or Goodreads, but rather the verdict of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez on his now posthumously published novel, Until August, a breezy romp brewed in his 70s and previously excerpted by the New Yorker in 1999 after he read from it on stage in Madrid with the late José Saramago.
The erotic adventures of a middle-aged mother, it was originally conceived as a five-part narrative more than 600 pages long, but was set aside so García Márquez could finish Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005), the final novel he published in his lifetime. From 2003, work resumed on and off; before his death in 2014, by which time he had lived with dementia for 10 years, he revisited it in a race between “perfectionism and his vanishing mental facilities”, his sons’ foreword tells us. If dementia left García Márquez unable to complete the book to his satisfaction, then perhaps the condition also made it harder for him to judge the book’s merit, his sons suggest; finding the novel valuable, they’ve chosen either way to ignore their father’s wishes and prioritise “readers’ pleasure”, having also let Netflix adapt his landmark magic-realist saga One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), against the author’s longtime refusal to have it screened.
