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Gabriel Gárcia Márquez is not the first writer to be ‘betrayed’ in death. The list of literary treachery is long

Many authors have been published despite their last wishes. The Colombian novelist has become the latest

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, died in 2014 at the age of 87. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

John Self
Sat Mar 16 2024 - 05:00

This week sees the publication, almost exactly 10 years after his death, of what Gabriel Gárcia Márquez’s publishers are calling “The Lost Novel”, Until August.

“Lost” is overstating it a bit – is having a laugh, in fact, since everyone involved knew about the book all along. The afterword by Márquez’s editor is somewhat vague on the key points, suggesting the book was written around 2003 but not completed then, making references to how “his memory did not allow him to fit together all the pieces and corrections of his last version”, and justifying publication because Gabo, as he was familiarly known, scribbled “Gran OK final” on the version we now see in print.

But the “memory” stuff is a euphemism: Márquez suffered from dementia in his later years, though he was able to make clear that he did not want Until August published. “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed,” he told his sons. At the time they agreed, hence the decade-long delay. But now they have, in their own words, “betrayed” his wishes, admitting that one reason for publishing the book now was to protect their copyright in case someone else did it later.

They also said: “Reading it once again almost 10 years after his death, we discovered that the text had many highly enjoyable merits and nothing that prevents us from delighting in the most outstanding aspects of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, his poetic language, his captivating storytelling, his understanding of humankind and his affection for our experiences and misadventures, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work.”

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No one should be surprised that Until August is second-rate work. If the book does not detract from Márquez’s legacy – those great monoliths One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera cannot be toppled – then nor does it add anything.

[ Gabriel Gárcia Márquez: left-wing writer who changed the course of literature in Spanish and did not fear politics ]

But Márquez is hardly the first author to be posthumously duped by those he trusted most. The most famous example of a writer whose wishes were ignored by a hungry estate is Franz Kafka, who died 100 years ago this June. Indeed, the very fact that it’s a date worth recording is due to Kafka’s betrayal by his friend Max Brod, whom he instructed to destroy all his unpublished work.

Without Brod, we would not have had most of Kafka’s short stories, any of his three novels, nor the diaries and letters, which are fascinating literary works in themselves. But Brod, whose divine punishment was to ensure his own immortality too but with his own writing – he was a prolific novelist – obliterated by his friend’s, also unknowingly created the Kafka industry. This reached its nadir with the publication in 2008 of The Office Writings, a collection of the reports Kafka wrote during his time as an insurance lawyer. (Don’t miss the classic “Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery”!)

Some scholars believe that Kafka chose Brod as his executor only because he knew he would not comply with his request, and would therefore give his writing another chance at recognition. Either way, he went further than most, in requiring all his unpublished writing to be destroyed. Other writers seek simply to block the publication of incomplete works. After all, as Vladimir Nabokov put it with his usual polish, “Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It’s like passing around samples of sputum.”

[ Nabokov had the butterfly blues ]

[ The Aphorisms of Kafka: An invaluable guidance along this shadowy path ]

Alas! Nabokov’s son Dmitri didn’t get the memo, and in 2009, 32 years after his father had requested its destruction, he published the “novel” The Original of Laura, which was not so much unfinished as barely begun, existing only as notes on index cards. Even arch-Nabokov groupie Martin Amis couldn’t get excited. “When a writer starts to come off the rails”, he wrote in his review, “you expect skid marks and broken glass. With Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.”

The argument for publishing such work, aside from any financial benefit to the estate (perish the thought), is that the writing stands independent of its creator, and has a life of its own. And after all, publishing it might make millions of people happy. Destroying it will only make one person happy, and he’s dead.

But we can’t pretend that we are all so high-minded. Sheer nosiness plays a part. Who, after the juicy letters of Philip Larkin were published, wouldn’t have minded a peep at the old man’s diaries? Too bad: his girlfriend Monica Jones did comply with his wishes, and destroyed them.

This does happen, albeit rarely. Terry Pratchett, who like Márquez wrote his last books under dementia, instructed his estate, run by his friend Rob Wilkins, to destroy any unfinished works by running them over with a steamroller. In 2017, two years after Pratchett’s death, Wilkins did just that, posting photos of the crushed hard drive (with steamroller in background) on social media.

The only way for an author to be sure their wishes will be honoured is to do it themselves while they still can. James Joyce burned his play A Brilliant Career and the first half of his novel Stephen Hero. Or if you prefer, you can enact the “betrayal” yourself before anyone else does. Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, essentially an early version of her classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, was published in 2015, while Lee was still alive but against her previously stated intentions.

[ Go Set a Watchman: 12 key points ]

The publication was controversial: the book was announced two months after the death of her sister who had acted as lawyer and caregiver for Lee, who was hard of hearing and almost blind. But others close to her conclude she did approve the publication – perhaps choosing to do it in her own way rather than having it done posthumously by another. She died seven months after it came out.

Still, even if Márquez, Lee and Nabokov are turning in their graves, at least these literary figures are spared the posthumous humiliation doled out to popular writers of genre fiction. Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Virginia Andrews and others are still publishing regularly from beyond the tomb, their names rented out to ghostwriters who can satisfy the demand for stories in the style, and under the name, their fans are used to.

But wait – literary authors can have it done to them too, as George Orwell’s estate proved when it authorised Julia, the companion novel to 1984 that was published last year. And so we wait, with heavy hearts, for the excitable announcement in the literary pages – maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon – of the imminent publication of Another Hundred Years of Solitude or What Lolita Did Next.