The latest from García Márquez

I have read enough about the posthumous novel by Gabriel García Márquez in recent days to know what it is about and under what conditions it was written by the author, who, dissatisfied with the result, even expressed his refusal to have it published.

One is not immune to admiration nor free from curiosity, and my first impulse was little different from that of the enthusiastic teenagers queuing at the entrance to bookstores waiting to purchase their copy of

.

I will confess that what was stated by the usual public literature appraisers did not dissuade me from approaching García Márquez's novel, although it lowered my expectations.

In the warnings of some I seemed to detect a certain tone of condescension.

“It has good things,” they came to say, “you can read it, but don't get your hopes up too high.”

Even so, I undertook the simple procedures to purchase the book on the Internet, motivated both by the aforementioned burst of curiosity and by the desire to administer a new and surely last dose of the literary delight that I have associated since my youth with García Márquez.

And all I needed to do was activate the purchase order on the screen when intense scruples began to bother me, the same ones that come to me every time I see former football glories, now aged and flabby, jogging on the occasion of a commemorative match.

I was not only afraid of finding myself faced with a sad case of diminished creative power, justifiable by the author's mental deterioration (this be said with all due respect), but also of being willing to infer a tear in the very high esteem that I profess for the Colombian writer.

So instead of buying the book, I chose to pay García Márquez the sincere tribute of not reading

, although, aware of the enormous force that temptations exert on me, I doubt that I can resist them for long.

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