GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ, SEE YOU IN AUGUST (MONDADORI, PP 120, EURO 17.50).
Ten years after the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which occurred on 17 April 2014, the novel, which has remained unpublished until now, is published and which the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for Literature wanted destroyed.
The children of the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, tell it in the prologue to 'See you in August' which arrives in bookshops worldwide on 6 March 2024, on the Colombian writer's birthday, known by the nickname Gabo, born in 1927. In Italy Mondadori publishes it in the translation by Bruno Arpaia, edited by the editor and friend Cristóbal Pera.
Once again Gabo surprises us, but this time in a different way, with the story of a 46-year-old married woman, with two beautiful golden eyes, who every year, on August 16, goes to a Caribbean island to bring a bouquet of fresh gladioli on the mother's grave.
On that journey she meets, for the first time unexpectedly and then in an unstoppable chain, a new lover and she discovers she is different from how others imagine her and she herself sees herself.
An exploration of desire and love also exalted in an interesting mirroring, with an ending that is not at all obvious.
"At the time, we only knew of Gabo's final sentence: 'This book doesn't work. It must be destroyed'. We didn't destroy it, but we put it aside, in the hope that time would decide what to do with it. Reading it once again at almost ten years after his death we discovered that the text had many merits that we could take advantage of" say Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha who also recognize some imperfections in the book.
However, the great capacity for invention and the poetry of the writer's language remains intact and a new look towards women and their freedom is revealed.
Garcia Marquez worked on 'See You in August' from 2003 to the end of 2004, when his memory began to betray him to the point of abandoning him, with the progression of Alzheimer's, which was officially spoken about in 2012, two years before his death. he.
There are five numbered versions of the novel found among the writer's papers kept at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, as Cristobal Pera explains in the final note.
The editor referred above all to version number 5, dated 5 July 2004, on which Gabo wrote: 'Great final ok' by crossing it with "a digital version in which fragments of other options or scenes that the author had taken in previously considered," he explains.
'See you in August' is therefore more than a precious unpublished novel because in this short but intense novel there is also all of Garcia Marquez's strength to counteract the progressive loss of memory.
"It is the fruit of the last effort to continue to create against all adverse circumstances" as his children say.
In this latest book, the Nobel tells the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, who grew up in a family of musicians, married for 27 years to the only man she was engaged to, a conductor for whom she didn't finish school. of Arts and Letters.
With him she had a son, first cello, and a daughter who has the talent of learning any instrument by ear but she was determined, to the displeasure of her parents, to become a barefoot Carmelite nun.
Without having foreseen it in her trips to go to her mother's grave, in a poor cemetery, on the same fiery day in August, Ana Magdalena finds herself "embellished by the sacred mixture of music with gin" in the arms of another and then of another man.
On every trip she is accompanied by a book, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.
And as a soundtrack there is a lot of different music from Béla Bartók's Contrasts for piano and saxophone to Debussy's Moonlight in an arrangement for bolero.
In her relationships with these one-night-stand men Magdalena enters an unexpected vortex, she knows humiliation, anger, joy and even fun.
She delves into herself, opens her eyes to her marriage, to the way of experiencing sex also described in detail by Garcia Marquez, she reflects on her betrayal and begins to doubt her husband's fidelity.
Every year she comes back different in an unstoppable wave of transformation that changes everything.
The author of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, of Love in the Time of Cholera, of News of a Kidnapping, the greatest exponent of magical realism who in all his books has made love the main theme, here goes the other way of women with a new voice.
'See you in August' ends with a four-page facsimile of "Version 5" of the novel with the writer's corrections.
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