Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez gave us such canon works as Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and One Hundred Years of Solitude. His works spanned lifetimes or traced intergenerational sagas, frequently with the theme of love, both lost and found, behind each storyline. The preface to this new work, written by his two sons, tells us exactly what to expect from any of his works: “… his capacity for invention, his poetic use of language, his captivating storytelling, his understanding of humankind, and his affection for our experiences and misadventures, especially when it comes to love”.
García Márquez died in 2014, but was diagnosed with dementia in 2002. He said to his sons, “Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it there is nothing.” He struggled to write in his later years and was unhappy with this “last” novel, asking that it be destroyed. Although it was incomplete, the author had read a chapter to an audience in 1999 and another fragment was published in 2003.
The story is this: Ana Magdalena Bach’s mother died eight years before the tale opens and every year she travels to the small Caribbean island where her mother is buried to tend the grave and leave a bouquet of gladioli. The repeat trip comes every August 16 and Ana Magdalena is a creature of habit, using the same rusting taxi cab and staying in the same room of a shabby hotel. On this particular visit, however, she takes an older man to her room and seduces him. They make love twice, but he is gone in the morning when she awakes. “Only when she picked up her book from the bedside table to put in her bag did she notice that he had left between its pages of horror a twenty-dollar bill.” The resentment at the banknote debases the night before. “She did not know whether to frame it as a trophy or tear it to shreds to exorcise the indignity. The only thing that seemed indecent was to spend it.” The book she was reading was Frankenstein.
A publisher’s blurb inside says that each time Ana Magdalena makes the island pilgrimage she takes a new lover for one night. Yet she has travelled there for seven years before she has a one-night stand and in the following year does her best to resist the advances of a second man. In succeeding years, she is not always successful at finding a lover, and at one point cries herself to sleep having rejected the advances of another. There is much more to the story than the cover is prepared to tell us. What is certain is the hand of the master behind the writing, drawing us quickly into the situation before painting a picture of Ana Magdalena’s marital happiness and family life. We see her at first as a virtual innocent, but her spicy (albeit monogamous) love life is also laid out in detail. She is a woman of contradictions.
It is true that this is not a completed work, that there are some inconsistencies in the plot, and that we get only 100 pages, but these faults can largely be forgiven of García Márquez for giving us a final great love story with a smart twist.
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez (Penguin, $40) is out now.
