An unpublished novel by García Márquez will be published in 2024

An unpublished novel by Gabriel García Márquez will see the light of day in the spring of 2024. This is what the heirs of the Nobel Prize for Literature have decided on the 10th anniversary of the author's death.

It is

, a 150-page manuscript, surely unfinished, whose writing and endless rewriting dragged the Colombian writer for years and which was deposited, like other papers by the author, at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, entity that acquired the funds.

The text will be published on its usual imprint, Random House Literature.

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The first time the existence of the work was known was in 1999, when the author read the story

en Casa América in Madrid, which he presented as a fragment and starting point for a future novel made up of five self-contained stories.

So, the Colombian was 72 years old and had recently overcome cancer.

The five stories, closed and autonomous stories, form a unitary whole starring Ana Magdalena Bach, a cultured and still beautiful woman, on the verge of old age, who every August 16 travels to the small town where her mother is buried, in the cemetery. of the poor, to tell him about his furtive and extramarital sexual encounters.

The author prioritized the writing of

, his long-awaited memoirs that came to light in 2002 and were a publishing success, especially in the US market.

Later, in 2004, came

, his last work of fiction.

However,

, which could have also appeared at that time, was definitely left in the drawer.

The fact that, from that moment on, his memory worsened, whose deterioration only worsened until his death, in 2014, at the age of 87, could also have had an influence.

Although he commented in a 2004 interview with the journalist Rosa Mora that he felt "quite satisfied" with how he had addressed the crisis suffered by the protagonist, his editor Cristóbal Pera revealed a year after his death that he was not completely convinced by the final result. of the novel, despite having worked extensively on it.

Gabo was famous for rewriting his books a dozen times until he achieved the desired result;

that final version had not been made in this case and the novel was ultimately scrapped.

Faced with this situation, the decision to publish it or not has fallen to his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, who have considered this possibility for a decade and, finally, have preferred that it see the light.

“

was the result of a last-ditch effort to continue creating against all odds.

Reading it once again almost 10 years after his death, we discovered that the text had many and highly enjoyable merits and nothing that prevents us from enjoying the most outstanding aspects of Gabo's work: his capacity for invention, the poetry of language, the captivating narrative, his understanding of the human being and his affection for his experiences and misadventures, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work," they announced in a statement.

Gabriel García Márquez is the most widely read Latin American author and the most translated author from Spanish in the 21st century, according to the Cervantes Institute, which has even unseated the author of Don

.

It is expected that this novel will be translated, among other languages, into English, French, German and Arabic.