“In August See You,” Gabriel García Márquez's posthumous novel, which will be published on Wednesday, posed an “indecipherable” challenge to the Colombian Nobel laureate shortly before his death, his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo told the press.
About 15 years before his death, in April 2014, “Gabo” began writing the book, which tells the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a woman who visits her mother's grave on a Caribbean island every August. The protagonist uses her travels to leave her chaste life behind and go on erotic dates with strangers.
In 1999, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature (1982) read the first chapter publicly, but refrained from publishing the rest of the work because it did not satisfy him, limiting himself to passing on versions of the manuscript to his relatives.
He considers it nonsense and a “disorder”, so it should be rejected, said Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha this Tuesday in a virtual press conference from Spain.
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“The book became something a little indecipherable in the last years of his life, marked by illness and memory loss,” commented Rodrigo.
By decision of his relatives, the manuscripts and typescripts of “See You In August” were stored in the Harry Ransom Center, a library at the University of Texas in the United States.
According to Gonzalo García, the opinions of scholars who read fragments of the work convinced the brothers to combine them into a book that would be published on the day their father would turn 97.
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“As we read the versions, we realized that the book was much better than we remembered, and so we began to suspect that just as Gabo lost the ability to write, he also lost the ability to read.” and thus lost “the ability to judge”. his own writings, he commented.
The Spanish version will be released in various countries on Wednesday and the English version on March 20, said Pilar Reyes, editorial director of Penguin Random House.
On Tuesday evening, the iconic Colpatria Tower in Bogotá was illuminated for several hours with the full-color images from the book's cover.
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Although rumor has it that the novel had no ending, the children of the main representative of magical realism assure that before his death he had fully developed the story of Anne Magdalena Bach.
“The novel was perhaps a little scattered in an indeterminate number of originals, but it was complete.” It was “an archaeological work” to unite the parts and reach an end, Gonzalo added.
Rodrigo assumed that there were no more hidden novels by García Márquez, which is why “En Agosto See You” is the “last survivor” of his literary universe.
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García Márquez, who died in Mexico City, is considered one of the most important authors in history and the most important author of the “Latin American boom,” a literary phenomenon that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
A series inspired by “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” his masterpiece, will premiere on the streaming platform Netflix this year.
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