The ‘lost’ novel of Gabriel García Márquez
UNTIL AUGUST GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Translated by Anne McLean 144pp. Viking. £16.99.
ONE OF Gabriel García Márquez’s shortest books has a title so long that it occupies the entire front cover: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who drifted on a liferaft for ten days without food or water, was proclaimed a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, made rich through publicity, and then spurned by the government and forgotten for all time. (I’ll spare you the Spanish title.) The book, first published in 1970, is a work of reportage that originally appeared in 1955 as a series in El Espectador de Bogotá; yet the trajectory of that long sentence contains all the elements that García Márquez prized in fiction: drama, pathos and excess.
His own life contained plenty of all three. At times during his childhood and as a young writer he was very poor, relying on friends for meals and loans. After the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967) – his fifth work of fiction –when he was forty, García Márquez became the most famous man in Colombia, regularly urged to stand for president and kissed not only by beauty queens, but by his good friend Fidel Castro. By the time he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature, in 1982, he was world-famous. He got invited to meet political leaders and took part in negotiations to end the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. After receiving death threats he travelled around Bogotá in an armoured car with a security detail. His various homes were all furnished in white, with a vase of yellow flowers on whichever writing desk he was using.
So far García Márquez has been spared the plunge into ignominy that so often follows a meteoric rise in his own novels. If more recent Colombian writers – including Laura Restrepo, Evelio Rosero and Juan Gabriel Vásquez – do not show his influence, that’s not surprising, given both his iconic status and the violence that continued to dominate their region until 2016, demanding a fresh response. One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera, 1985) remain in the canon. Any estate, however, must look to its legacy, and García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, have decided to publish one final novel, Until August (En agosto nos vemos). They should have resisted the temptation.
García Márquez is one of those rare authors who catch and ride a global wave. He belonged to a group of writers, also including Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes (the “Boom generation”), who made it glamorous, and not simply wholesome, to read translated fiction. For a time in the 1980s it felt as though ever
