Gabriel García Márquez’s final novel Until August is published 10 years after his death

García Márquez, considered one of the world’s most respected writers, dies in Mexico City

Madrid:

Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumous book is set to be published on Wednesday, his sons said, adding that the award-winning Colombian author was on the verge of death a decade ago. This is a difficult challenge.

Until August, the final book by the Latin American “magical realist” Nobel Prize winner, will be released in the original Spanish version “En agosto nos vemos” on March 6, and in English later this month.

Fifteen years before his death in 2014, the man affectionately known as “Gabo” began writing the story of Ana Magdalena Bach. Ana Magdalena Bach is a middle-aged woman who visits her mother’s grave on a Caribbean island every August. She uses the opportunity of travel to put aside her family life and have erotic trysts with strangers.

In 1999, he publicly read the first chapter, but was dissatisfied with the rest of the work and refused to publish it. Instead, he gave versions of the manuscript to his relatives.

The son of the internationally acclaimed author of novels such as “Love in the Time of Cholera”, Rodrigo Garcia Barcha and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, died on Tuesday Speaking at an online press conference in Spain, he said he believed his last book was a “mess” and should be discarded.

Rodrigo said that in the last years of his life, the book “became an unrecognizable little thing” characterized by illness and memory loss.

But close relatives decided to preserve the manuscript and other fragments of Until August at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive and library at the University of Texas at Austin.

According to Gonzalo Garcia, scholars who read some of the works convinced the brothers to unify them into a book and publish it on what would have been their father’s 97th birthday.

“When we read these versions (again), we realized the book was much better than we remembered,” Gonzalo Garcia said.

He added, “We began to suspect that just as Gabo had lost his ability to write, he had also lost his ability to read” and “judge” his own work.

‘archeology’

The Spanish version of the book will be released on Wednesday, and the English version will be available in bookstores on March 20, according to Pilar Reyes, editorial director of Penguin Random House.

While Until August is rumored to have no ending, García Márquez’s children say he had fully developed the story of protagonist Anna Magdalena Bach before his death.

“If anything, the novel is a little scattered in the number of original works, but it is complete,” emphasizes Gonzalo García. Piecing the pieces together and drawing conclusions is “an archaeological exercise,” he said.

Rodrigo predicts that no more hidden García Márquez novels await. “Until August” is the “last survivor” of his literary works.

García Márquez, who died in Mexico City, was considered one of the world’s most respected writers and a major driving force in the Latin American literary wave of the 1960s and 1970s.

Streaming platform Netflix will premiere a series inspired by his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude this year.

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