A disobedience to dad, perhaps the last, of
Gabriel García Márquez's children,
made it possible for an
unpublished
Gabo to be, as of March 6, in bookstores around the world and in almost fifty languages.
See you in August
, the
posthumous short novel
published by Random House, is the gift that
Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha
offer to the devotees of the Nobel Prize who would turn 97 on March 6.
This Tuesday, March 5, at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, the heirs - Gonzalo, in person, and Rodrigo, by videoconference - presented the unpublished
novel
along with
Pilar Reyes
, director of the literary division of the Penguin Random House publishing group.
They told why,
ten years after his death,
they decided to publish a novel that Gabo never submitted to a publisher and shared intimacies of how they lived with the manuscripts of that last exercise of inventiveness of their father, before a voracious forgetfulness emptied him of memories forever.
In the 110 pages of
In August See Us
, García Márquez creates and recreates
Ana Magdalena Bach, a woman over 40
who will play at being someone else for only one night a year.
Garcia Marquez.
Corrections by hand.
Photo: Cézaro De Lucca
The protagonist, named after the German soprano who was the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach, will use as an excuse the
pagan liturgy
of, every August, offering flowers to her mother's grave on an island to explore
transgression, desire , the blame
.
And to open her eyes to
side B of the peaceful married life
that she had led until she was 50 years old without apparent fissures.
“This book is useless. It must be destroyed.”
It was García Márquez's forceful sentence in those days between June and July 2004 in which he continued editing and correcting while fighting against the invisible short circuits of his memory.
“Finally, it will be the readers who will decide.
We did it thinking it was worth it.
It seemed to us that when Gabo said: 'This is not publishable'
he had already lost the ability to judge
whether or not it was publishable,” Rodrigo, his eldest son, who is a filmmaker, justified the decision.
Because when they handed over to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, in the United States, the assets of the 80 boxes of papers, the 67 computer disks, 15 other file cabinets and three folders with writings by Gabriel García Márquez in exchange for 2.2 million
dollars
, the heirs reserved the five versions of
In August See You
that appeared among the writings.
Five versions of a work
“We had it closed for several years, kidnapped,” Rodrigo admitted.
And then those pages were opened to academics, to scholars.
When we read the versions we realized that the book was much better than we remembered.”
With those 5 versions of the text
deliciously corrected by hand by Gabo in different colors
- or helped in black pencil by Mónica Alonso, who was his secretary -, García Márquez's children summoned
Cristóbal Pera
, the editor who had worked with their father on his autobiography -
Live to tell it
, from 2002 - and in his collection of articles
I am not coming to say a speech
, from 2010.
They put in the editor's hands those
open-hearted
texts where Gabo had edited subtleties such as replacing
the word "steam" with "drowsiness"
in the phrase: "He allowed himself a minute of nostalgia to contemplate the herons that hovered motionless in the burning drowsiness of the lagoon".
“What Cristobal Pera has done has been more of a
work of archeology
, collecting all the typescripts that existed until reaching a final original,” said Gonzalo, Rodrigo's son four years younger, who dedicated himself to graphic design, painting and book publishing.
“Nothing has been added that was not in the original multiples
,” insisted the youngest García Barcha.
“Still with Gabo alive, talking to him, Cristobal asked him the
question about the ending
.
Gabo told him that the novel had an ending.
At that moment they read it together,” Gonzalo said.
“No editing work has been done to the point of having to add phrases to the novel,” he stressed.
“It was a bit scattered across a number of originals but it was complete.
We have not added anything,” the heirs repeated.
For Pilar Reyes,
“the novel is complete although for its author it was not definitive.”
“We are witnesses of a writer's attempt to write
against all odds
, in the most adverse conditions, even
against his own limitations
,” he stressed.
The editorial director commented that the first edition is
250 thousand copies
and that the novel - which Random publishes in Spanish, except in Mexico and Central America - is published simultaneously in Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Romania, Russia , Taiwan and Turkey, among other countries.
He also noted that on March 12 it will be published in English and French.
Also, in India and the Czech Republic.
And that, in a few months, it will be in the Scandinavian countries and Iceland.
See yourself again with a great
It was in this same city of
Madrid
where, 25 years ago, Gabo
read aloud the first chapter
of
In August See You
.
He did it during a meeting with
José Saramago
at Casa de América, in March 1999. At that time, García Márquez said that he was working on a novel that would be made up of 5 autonomous stories and the same protagonist.
“We read part of the book in his processes and then there were times when he stopped working on it,” Rodrigo recalled.
Finally there came a stage where
he lost his memory and left him.
”
According to the eldest son of the Nobel Prize winner,
“the book became an indecipherable thing for him.”
“He never kept unpublished books,” he said. “
He said that book didn't work, but he didn't destroy it.
“That encouraged us.”
And he clarified that there will be no future unpublished García Márquez: “There are no more books because there are no more unfinished books.”
Gonzalo confessed that the publication of
In August See Us
closes, in some way, his grief
: “For me, the fact that this book comes out leaves me calm in the sense that all of Gabo's work is now available to his readers. ”.
“The mysterious novel does not remain in an archive.
"There is no need to travel, if one is curious enough to read it," he added.
Starting tomorrow, by going to the bookstore on the corner, Gabo's readers will be free from the doubt of whether Gabo's children were flagrantly wrong or not."
feminist gabo
“Gabo
considered himself a feminist in the way he led his life,
” said Rodrigo.
And then we had my mother (Mercedes Barcha), who had her personality that wasn't crushed by Gabo or Gabo's fame.
There was no feminist discourse but there was an example.”
Regarding Ana Magdalena Bach, the protagonist of "In August See You", the eldest of García Márquez's children stressed regarding his complete work: “It has great female characters, but it has few
books and few stories in which the main character is "a woman of this age and with these characteristics,
" said Rodrigo.
In that sense, he also encouraged us to publish the book because it is not like other books. ”
The bonus track of the Spanish edition are the
facsimiles of four of the pages of version 5
of
In August See You
, with the annotations in the margins and a
“Final Big OK”
scribbled by Gabo.
Gabo's dreams
“He was a very practical person,
I don't want to give a magical image of him
.
But he came from a culture where instinct was a very important factor,” Gonzalo recalled.
“Gabo comes from a region of Colombia where dreams are a fundamental factor.
In the
Guajira ethnic group
, in which he was raised, dreams, premonitions, superstitions are important,” he added.
“One of the symptoms of his illness in old age was the fact that there came a time when
he did not remember the dreams of the previous night.
It was one of the signs he had about the limitations he was having.
Somehow the dreams that he had every day helped him resolve literary issues in his books,” confessed his youngest son.
Reyes cited a reflection that García Márquez shared with his children when he turned 70. Luckily he still had 17 more years to live.
“Years ago I heard that there comes a time in a writer's life when he can no longer write an extensive work of fiction,” said Gabo.
The head can no longer contain the vast architecture and traverse the treacherous terrain of a long novel.
It's true, I'm sorry.
So,
from now on, they will be shorter texts
.”
See you in August
fulfills this premise.
The last days of the Nobel Prize
During the presentation of Gabo's posthumous book, his children allowed themselves to share some glimpses of the García Márquez's daily life
: “At 8 years old, hearing so much about
One Hundred Years of Solitude
had us fed up
,” Rodrigo confessed.
Or to say that, at the Nobel Prize winner's house, "they did not read a
work in progress
" about what Gabo was writing or that Mercedes, his wife, liked to know the story with the book already published and not in single and corrected pages. .
Garcia Marquez.
unpublished work
Regarding the illness that the Nobel Prize winner suffered in his last years, Gonzalo confessed: “One thinks that
senile dementia
or
Alzheimer's
is a temporary situation.
"He has hope that everything will return to normal," he said about how he accompanied his father.
When one is resigned to the fact that there is no turning back from this and the person is no longer distressed by the situation, because they no longer remember that they do not remember, there is great humanization.”
“In my case, I think there was a very benign aspect and that is that a person who was very volatile in his way of being and in his daily actions - like Gabo was - who was in one place and then in another, spoke on the phone,
resolved here and there, what if peace in Colombia, what if the situation in Latin America, suddenly that stopped
,” Gonzalo reviewed.
“Suddenly, what we had in the house was grandfather and we were able to enjoy him for some years.
There was little mythological about that character.
Just the grandfather myth.
For us it was a return to normal life,” she shared.
In the prologue to
In August See Us
, Gabo's children admit that the book
“has some potholes and small contradictions.”
This Tuesday, at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid, Gonzalo confessed that he listened to his father's posthumous novel in audiobook version during the almost 3 hours of the train trip that brought him from Barcelona to Madrid and that he did not discover those inconsistencies that he thought there were. noticed the first time he read the novel.
“The audiobook lasts as long as it takes for the train to leave Sants station to Atocha,” he said.
I listened to it without interruptions and found nothing
.”
Correspondent in Madrid
J.S.