2024-03-07 02:51:09
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Novel cover
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- Author, Yasmine Ruffo and Santiago Vanegas
- Role, BBC News/BBC Mundo
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3 hours ago
When Nobel Prize-winning author and writer Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago, he left behind a novel he wrote while suffering from dementia.
In his final days, he told his children that the novel must be destroyed.
But they defied their father’s wishes and published the book, in what they called an act of “treason.”
The book, titled “See you in August,” was already published in Spanish this week and is scheduled to arrive in bookstores around the world on March 12.
It is a short novel, approximately 100 to 120 pages in length, depending on the language of translation.
The novel’s events revolve around Anna Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who travels alone to an island every August to visit her mother’s grave. On each trip, she brings along a new lover despite her happy marriage for more than twenty years.
This is the first time that a work by Garcia Márquez focuses on a female heroine.
The Colombian novelist and writer, who died in 2014, was a pioneer of magical realism literature.
Among his most famous works are “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which have sold more than 50 million copies around the world.
“That’s what the kids say”
“My father was not in a position to judge his work because he only saw flaws and not interesting things,” García Márquez’s son Gonzalo tells BBC Radio 4, justifying the novel’s publication.
After reading the text again recently, Gonzalo said that he “did not find it as disastrous as Gabo judged it” and that it was a valuable addition to his work because it showed a new and “unique” side of his father.
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Gonzalo holds a copy of the novel
He added: “We certainly didn’t tear it up. In 2022, we took the draft of the novel and read it, and there wasn’t a lot of discussion about it.”
“We realized the book was complete, and we realized we didn’t have to do a lot of editing,” he added.
“There are no additions, there are no major changes. So there was really no discussion there.
“We thought about it for about three seconds,” he said. “Was this a betrayal of my father, or his wishes?”
“We decided, yes, it’s treason. But that’s what the kids were there for.”
He said the book had to be published eventually, so the family wanted to publish a version they approved, so the family’s copyright could be protected.
‘A huge responsibility’
“The biggest challenge in editing the unfinished novel was to show absolute respect for the work of Gabriel García Márquez,” said Cristobal Pera, editor of the final version of “See You in August.”
“It was a task of enormous responsibility. I didn’t have to add a single word, of course,” he told BBC Mundo.
Pera had been García Márquez’s editor since 2001 and played a role in encouraging him to complete the novel.
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Marquez and Pera
“He wrote the first draft in 2004,” Berra said. “By 2011, he was already losing his memory and was no longer working on the novel.”
“But he was committed to continuing to correct a word or phrase to improve it, and there his genius shined in the corrections he introduced on a limited scale.”
Berra worked on a fifth draft that had García Márquez’s handwritten notes in the margins, with changes and suggestions.
“You just had to follow the comments he left to make the decision, for example, to delete a phrase that had been crossed out,” he said.
Fiction project
The editor recalls that in an interview given by Gabriel García Márquez in Madrid, he publicly read the first chapter of “Goodbye in August” and said that he was writing a series of short novels about middle-aged love.
This novel was part of a narrative project that included “Love and Other Demons” and “Sad Memories of My Whores.”
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It is Márquez’s first novel with a female protagonist
“Women have been of great importance in García Márquez’s novels since ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ and in all of his stories, but they have never had a starring role like the role of Anna Magdalena Bach, a woman who decided to explore her sexuality and freedom,” Pera said.
He added, “For this reason, it is a novel that his son Rodrigo himself described as feminist. I think that this novel rearranges all of Garcia Márquez’s works, especially the role of women in it. I think that is why it is important.”
Netflix plans
In addition to the new book, Márquez’s 1967 novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” is being adapted into a Spanish-language series on the Netflix platform.
According to the New York Times, Márquez received many offers over the years to turn the novel into a film, but he declined because he wanted it to be in Spanish only.
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Marquis
“See You in August” by García Márquez is not the first novel to be published after the death of its author and against his wishes:
- Before author Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his works. However, between 1925 and 1935, Brod published Kafka’s works, including The Trial, The Castle and America.
- “Lolita” writer Vladimir Nabokov has asked his wife to destroy his last novel, “Laura’s Origin,” if he dies before completing it. In 2009, 30 years after Nabokov’s death, his son released the unfinished work, which was written in pencil on index cards.
- The Roman poet Virgil requested that the manuscripts in which he wrote his epic The Aeneid be burned because he feared he would not be able to finish the work before his death.
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