Once a year, in August, a middle-aged woman travels to a Caribbean island to lay flowers on her mother’s grave. On the eighth of these pilgrimages, without premeditation, she invites a man who – like her – is sitting alone in the hotel bar, to come up to her room. They make love. Their excitement is mirrored by turbulent weather: there is a thunderstorm and blue herons fly agitated over the lagoon. When she wakes in the morning the man has gone. She doesn’t even know his name. Afterwards, every year, she sets out to repeat the experience with another stranger.
That, in bald outline, is the plot of this short novel, the last that Gabriel García Márquez wrote, published nearly a decade after his death. No one, except for the publicists whose job it is to do so, is pretending that it is a masterpiece, lost and now regained. García Márquez himself told his sons, knowing that he was losing his memory to dementia, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”
