The story of the woman who visits her mother's grave on a Caribbean island every August 16 comes to the public this March 6, the 97th birthday of its creator, Gabriel García Márquez.
The date is festive or commemorative everywhere: almost a month after his first decade since his death, we once again have—20 years after
Memories of My Sad Whores
—a new novel by the Nobel Prize winner on the shelves of the world, in the year in which The premiere of the Netflix series adaptation of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is also expected
.
It is the latest act of sleight of hand by an author who continues to be read, commented on and, as expected, hacked into .pdf files that have circulated in WhatsApp chats with the unpublished work.
The plot of
In August See Us
has that timeless air of Garciamarquian plots: Ana Magdalena Bach goes every year to the cemetery where her mother is buried, on a Caribbean island where she follows a stubborn routine, taking the same taxi, staying in the same hotel. and buying gladioli from the same florist.
At night she has the usual sandwich for dinner and the only drink she drinks is a gin with soda and ice.
Order is broken when, after visiting the cemetery, she decides, at 49 years old, to spend the night with a man who is not her husband and who humiliates her by leaving her a few dollars ("They are made of flesh and blood," she will say later) between the pages of your copy of
Dracula
.
Ana Magdalena's meeting with her mother evokes the posthumous conversation that this novel begins to foster with readers.
As if before his ashes, we return to visit García Márquez, and we find him very much alive.
One of the first to publicly review the work was the historian Nicolás Pernett, who visited the University of Texas in search of the Colombian writer's boxes in the archive that also houses papers by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and other universal authors.
Pernett places the new protagonist far from others that we have read in the work of the author of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967): “She is a woman from the end of the 20th century, different from the village woman, brave and resistant like Úrsula Iguarán, or that of 19th century Cartagena like Fermina Daza.”
Ana Magdalena is “more modern, she is not afraid of travel, she is quite liberal and very worldly,” which is why he considers her an “important update of García Márquez's characters,” without colonels or characters in a rural context.
In
August we see each other
, different versions were compared, and finally the one was put to press under the care of the editor Cristóbal Pera, who worked with the author on works such as
Live to tell it
(2002) and
Yo no vengo adar un discourse
(2010). , the last book he published while he was alive.
In case doubts persist, the text is entirely written by García Márquez.
“The novel is finished and has an ending,” Pernett clarifies.
Another reader of the manuscripts, to whom the author read one of the fragments by telephone, is the journalist and writer Patricia Lara, who says that the book could have begun to take shape before
Memorias de mis putas tristes
: “He was with that novel [
In August we will see
each other between chest and back.”
While Lara affirms that the novel “is written in captivating and fascinating prose, like everything else of his,” teacher Nadia Celis—another early reader—highlights his “narrative mastery, that ability to sketch a character with two or three strokes and leaving us with the feeling that he exposed it in its great fissures.”
At the same time, she believes that “it is not necessarily representative of his greatest literary achievements.”
Orlando Oliveros, editor of the Gabo Center of the Gabo Foundation, says that in the Nobel Prize winner's work there are many female characters surrounded by death.
"However, the death that surrounds Anne Magdalena Bach is different: it is more linked to reflection and memory than to violence."
Furthermore, he considers that this posthumous fiction – the eleventh and last novel – is an inversion of
Memoria de mis putas tristes
, the story of the 90-year-old man in love with a teenage girl.
“Both constitute two sides of a coin about the loves between people separated by generational gaps.”
That coin has also been seen as a triptych, to which is added
Of Love and Other Demons
(1994).
Partly to expand this exploration, they decided to publish it, as his son Rodrigo García told EL PAÍS: “Because of her point of view, that of a woman, it seemed to us that it would broaden Gabo's world for his readers, and especially for his readers.”
Oliveros asks himself: “Who wouldn't want to read an unpublished story by Borges or Tolstoy, even if it were a draft?
Who wouldn't want to read the last thing García Márquez tried to write?
“I’m all for insatiable curiosity and the crime scene being an unpolished book.”
That crime scene has its peculiarities.
One of them, says Celis, are the “three generations of women who deal with desire”: the buried mother – of whom a past that ties her to her daughter is revealed –, the daughter who visits her and the daughter and granddaughter who He faces his own troubles at home.
For Pernett, the novel insists on a concern of the author's last stage: music.
In the narrative the names of composers follow one another and famous bolero singers and different orchestras perform in the dance halls.
Ana Magdalena encounters good dancers and mediocre dancers, and one reads comments like: “she realized that she knew about music and that he had not gone beyond the
blue Danube
.”
Lara recalls a teaching by García Márquez, who said that the first paragraph of a journalistic text competed with the attention that the reader placed on the steaming coffee and the hot croissant in the morning, so that the reader had to try to let go of the food. and will not stop until finishing the text.
“García Márquez has the infinite virtue that he grabs, catches the reader immediately.
And even more so in this one, as it is a short novel.”
Celis is concerned that in the narrative “the characters' conflicts are more outlined than addressed,” but he finds it “interesting” that everyone reads and forms their opinion.
Pernett says that García Márquez's work “is already framed in gold” and a novel will not make him “go down or rise any higher, but it is a very pleasant read.”
By carefully reading this posthumous book, “readers will find yet another way into the vision of the world that the writer left us,” says Oliveros.
In Colombia, the publisher celebrated the launch this Tuesday by illuminating the Colpatria tower in Bogotá with 40,000 LED lights.
The abundance of publications in the media, international newspapers and social networks attest to the enthusiasm with which a novelty from the writer in Spanish with the most translations in the 21st century is received.
Another announced text is the prologue, in which the sons Gonzalo and Rodrigo García Barcha point out that the novel contains “the most outstanding aspects of Gabo's work.”
To the heirs, perhaps to free them from all guilt, the father told them to do whatever they wanted with him after he died.
Perhaps in this way he lightened the weight of his living and inexhaustible legacy.
Or he left it as a “posthumous trick”, similar to Anne Magdalena Bach's mother.
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