Garcia Marquez’s children presented a book that the Nobel laureate wanted to destroy

See You in August, unpublished by Gabriel García Márquez, is a “violent” and feminine novel that the author said he wanted to destroy, but which his children published, thereby making the Nobel Prize winner’s entire work available to readers. literature.

Twenty years after the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927-2014) last novel, The Memory of My Sad Whores (2004), and ten years after his death, it arrives in bookstores around the world, on Wednesday the author’s posthumous novel is an event that Spanish Penguin Random House, which publishes this work, considers it “a celebration of world literature.”

At a press conference on Tuesday at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid, the sons of Colombian writers Gonzalo García Barcha and Rodrigo García Barcha and Penguin’s editorial director of literature, Pilar Reyes, explained the origins of the book and the reason why it was written. they saved it from oblivion more than 10 years after its author decided it was “no use.”

“It’s useless. It must be destroyed”

“This book is useless. It must be destroyed,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, known as Gabo, told his agent Carmen Balcells after spending years working on it, his children confirmed Tuesday.

It was because they saw how dedicated their father was to working on this novel, and it was only when he began to lose his memory and abandoned it that they decided to give it a chance.

“When he said that the book was useless and made no sense, we suspected that he had lost the ability to judge the book, because he also asked for the ability to write and read. He never kept unedited books; they were destroyed. The fact that he didn’t have. If this book was destroyed, it had to have meaning, otherwise it would have been destroyed so that it would not exist,” explained Rodrigo García Barcha.

The Colombian director also emphasized that “there are no more books, this is the last one standing”.

Gonzalo García Barcha added that his children’s intention was to “prevent Gabos from losing his freedom” by allowing readers to access all of the writer’s works just a short distance from the bookstore.

feminist novel

An alternative would be to store it in the writer’s personal archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, USA. According to his children, the novel “See You in August” has “many of Gabo’s characteristics: the beauty of prose, the knowledge of people and the power of description”, but its main character is a woman, which was not the case. is very common in his works, with rare exceptions, such as in “The Incredible and Sad Story of Candida Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.”

“Gabo does not have an affair with a woman with these characteristics, this also prompted us to publish this book, since it is not like any of those already published,” emphasized Rodrigo Barcha.

Gabriel García Márquez was always very fond of women, mainly because he grew up surrounded by “strong women”—his grandmother, his mother, his sisters—and “he considered himself a feminist in the way he led his life.

Plus we had a mother [Mercedes Barcha] who was also always very strong. That is, there was no speech, but an example,” he added.

The story is an example of a woman’s influence on the author

Gonzalo Barcha also said that, despite the fact that there were many more men in his family, “Gabo said that it was Mercedes who drove everything” and when he died, “Mercedes acquired an extraordinary dimension, she was always an example of an absolute leader.”

This new novel is an example of such influence, as “the main character is a free, independent character with great strength of character.”

Regarding the posthumous edition, Gonzalo Barcha, who also works in cinema as a producer, ensured that the text included in the novel is the “complete text”.

“Nothing was added that would not have been in the numerous originals of this novel left by Gabo. There was no editing work, no additions needed. It was a little scattered across a certain number of originals, but it was complete,” he explained.

Pilar Reyes detailed that the most recent versions of the manuscripts had some additions made by the author, and that the “work with language and words, the work of self-editing” done by the author became apparent.

The editor’s job was simply to “trace the trail a little bit” and arrive at the final version because the story was complete, he said, adding that the novel, translated into about 40 languages, had a “very strong” first edition. “, with a circulation of 250 thousand copies.

The book was opened in the presence of Saramago.

The first discovery of the existence of this novel occurred on March 18, 1999, when I participated in a story reading at the Casa da América in Madrid along with several other writers, including José Saramago.

Then Gabriel García Márquez surprised those present by announcing that he was working on a new book, which would be called “See You in August.”

In addition to a prologue written by Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha to explain to the reader the circumstances surrounding this book, and a concluding note by the book’s editor, Cristóbal Pera, this edition also consists of four pages. “similar” to the original manuscript, says Maison Quixote, which is publishing the book in Portugal, translated by J. Teixeira de Aguilar.

See You in August centers on Ana Magdalena Bach, a married woman with two children and a stable life who travels to the island where her mother is buried at the same time every year to visit and lay flowers. his grave.

Every year he stays at a hotel and goes down at night to have a snack in a bar and watch men, until it becomes a routine in his life, every year, in August, visiting his mother’s grave, to arrange for himself a new lover. , reveals the publisher, describing the novel as “a hymn to life, the persistence of pleasure despite the passage of time, and female desire.”