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Subtitle,
García Márquez's family decided to publish the novel ten years after his death.
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- Author: Santiago Vanegas
- Role, BBC News World
1 hour
It is a short novel of 122 pages that follows Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who has been happily married for 27 years and has no reason to want to escape the life she has built for herself. But every August he travels to his mother's grave on an island and becomes a different person for one night.
This Wednesday it arrived in bookstores around the world.
Gabriel García Márquez worked long and hard on it, but the process was interrupted by the deterioration of his memory. He put it down himself in the years before his death. “This book doesn’t work. “We have to destroy it.”he said.
However, his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo decided to rescue it from the archives of the University of Texas at Austin and publish it as the tenth anniversary of the writer's death approaches.
“My theory is that he lost the ability to judge it when he said it didn't work. It's not as polished as her other novels, but it's not an incomprehensible mess either. I think it was him who no longer understood anything,” Rodrigo García told the press.
Cristóbal Pera, editorial director of Planeta Unidos, worked with García Márquez on “In August See You” during his lifetime and also edited the final version of the book.
In an interview with BBC Mundo, Pera talks behind the scenes of the book that many are calling the literary event of the year.
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Subtitle,
Cristóbal Pera, editorial director of Planeta Unidos, with Gabriel García Márquez.
How did you come to work on “In August See You” and what was your relationship with García Márquez in the process?
I was García Márquez's editor since 2001, when I helped edit his memoirs, Vivir para Narrala. A long-distance relationship began between editor and author, which we later resumed in person when I traveled to Mexico in 2006. I had a lasting relationship with him in the edition of I Didn't Come to Give a Speech, the book that collects all his speeches and was published in 2010.
And finally, as I mention in the editor's note to the book, García Márquez's agent, Carmen Balcells, asked me in 2010 to encourage him to finish his novel In August See You, about which I had no news. .
When I returned to Mexico, I told him about it. He had already completed a first draft in 2004.
Back then, in 2010 and 2011, I was already starting to lose my memory a little and I wasn't really working on the novel. But he devoted himself to correcting a word, a phrase, to improve it, and this is where his genius showed itself, in these small corrections.
I was able to read three or four chapters of the novel aloud with him in front of me, and I really enjoyed it. I saw that the topic was unprecedented for him too, with a protagonist who had not existed in his story.
And he continued to make notes on a fifth version, among the versions he had made, until he finally abandoned it as his illness progressed.
What happened to the novel after García Márquez's death in 2014?
After his death, the family decided that it was not time to publish this novel, which he had also said he did not want to publish in his final years.
All of García Márquez's papers, including this manuscript, ended up at the University of Texas at Austin and became the large García Márquez archive. This novel was not initially available to the public, but some people were able to see it.
After seeing that some people had access to the manuscript and said it was very good and that it should be published, García Márquez's children finally decided to ignore their father and publish it. And then they ask me to work on the final edition of the novel.
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Subtitle,
“This novel was part of a narrative project,” says the editor of García Márquez.
What was García Márquez's relationship to this novel, apart from discarding it in his final years? What vision did he have of it?
This novel was part of a narrative project.
In an interview he gives in Madrid, while publicly reading the first chapter of this novel, he tells the journalist that he is writing a series of short novels with the general theme of middle-aged love. “Of Love and Other Demons” was part of it.
Then, in 2002, when he returned home to Los Angeles after a bout with cancer, he picked up the manuscript of what would become Memories of My Sad Whores and completed it within a year and it was published.
And then he devotes an entire year to working on the draft he already had for “See You in August.”
Then he sends a manuscript to the Balcells agency, and this is the fifth version that he abandons, abandons in the sense that he lets it rest, as he tells his secretary Mónica Alonso. García Márquez's secretary is indispensable. He was the one who helped him and who kept the manuscripts.
In his last years, when his memory was failing and he didn't recognize much, he mentioned several times that he didn't want to publish the novel, that it wasn't finished yet, etc.
But well, as the children say in the introduction to the book, the novel was not polished, but finished, readers will see that. Of course I didn't have to add a word. I don't even have to say that I didn't add anything.
What details can you share about the book editing process? What challenges have you encountered?
The biggest challenge was the absolute respect for García Márquez's work. It is a job with enormous responsibility.
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to work side by side with him a lot, so I knew his work very well, I had worked with him on proofs, I knew how he worked and that helped me.
The most important thing was to read the entire manuscript and make sure the story was complete and finished. There was nothing to do there to finish anything, nor to add a sentence or an ending, it was all there.
I did the editing work with the manuscript, which was in a Word document, and the fifth version, which was printed with lots of handwritten notes in the margins, with changes, with things. At this point I turn to editing to get to the final text.
All you had to do was follow the clues he left behind, for example, to make the decision to delete a sentence that had been crossed out.
And then what I had to make were some changes that came from checking data such as the names of the authors mentioned, the normal work of an editor and some questions about the coherence of the text itself.
Image copyrightMónica Alonso
Subtitle,
“It is a job with enormous responsibility,” says Pera.
What do you mean by coherence problems?
There are a few examples that I mention in the editor's note. In the novel, the protagonist ends the last chapter at the end of 50 years, so in the first chapter she is 46 years old if you do the math.
The point is that in the first chapter he describes the protagonist as a woman on the verge of seniority, and he himself marks this sentence and puts a question mark on it. Obviously it was from an early version and he realizes that a 46 year old woman is obviously not close to what we think of as age.
Since I, as an editor, am simply interpreting his sign, I remove the reference to older people and the reader is not confused because it is a 46-year-old woman.
Another example is that the protagonist meets a man in the first chapter and meets him again years later in the last chapter on a street in a coastal town and at first she doesn't recognize him because he says he has a mustache .that he didn't wear it, when he met him. And in the first chapter the man actually appears with a mustache.
These are simply questions of narrative coherence that he would have seen in a final review. Therefore, the mention of the mustache had to be removed from this first chapter in order for this final reference to make sense.
My interventions were as follows: follow all their tracks and simply control the narrative coherence of the ages, the chronology, the names, etc. etc.
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What does this book represent in García Márquez's literature and what does it say about the end of his career?
Readers will be the ones to judge “See You in August.” I believe that this novel concludes its entire narrative with a flourish. And I think deep down he was aware of it.
It is a novel with a female protagonist, unlike all his novels. And women have played a major role in his novels for A Hundred Years of Solitude and in all his stories, but they have never had a leading role like that of Ana Magdalena Bach, a woman who decides to explore her sexuality and her freedom.
This leads to conflict, but she continues on this path, even though she is a woman who is theoretically happy and has no objective reasons for it.
That's why it's a novel that his son Rodrigo himself described as feminist. I think that this novel reorganizes the entire work of García Márquez and in particular the role of women in it, which needs to be reconsidered after this novel. I think that's why it's so important.
Then in its style, in the way it's told, it's set in an unnamed place and time, probably in the '80s or '90s on the coast of Colombia on an island, but it's not really well known. He doesn't want to leave strict traces of his origins, which is a novelty.
It is then a work that does justice to the others…
Definitely. But what I say is of no use, because readers will be in a position to judge from now on.
I can only look back to the time I read several chapters of the novel aloud with him for the first time. At that moment I thought that I hope that one day all García Márquez readers can enjoy the masterpiece that I had the pleasure of reading for the first time.
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