Gabriel “Gabo” García Márquez was a rare thing, a literary giant (One Hundred Years of Solitude has been compared to Genesis) who despite his flaws had a magnificent heart, one without a whiff of pettiness. In his novel Until August, released a decade after his death in 2014, the middle-aged Ana Magdalena Bach visits her dead mother. “She had repeated this trip every August 16 at the same time, with the same taxi and the same florist, under the fiery sun of that destitute cemetery, to place a bouquet of fresh gladioli on her mother’s grave.” She also, on each trip, takes a lover.
Márquez’s writing is often musical. For example, the fictional town of Macondo is a recurring motif; a prostitute who appears in Hundred Years and Love in the Time of Cholera, gets her own cadenza in the story, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira. Given that the heroine of Until August is named after the wife of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, it is unsurprising that the book is constructed as a fugue.
In a fugue a melody recurs but tonal changes enable the tune to ascend and finish. With every Ana Magdalena voyage, she reads a book and listens to a piece of music. About Ana’s first amorous encounter, Márquez writes: “She talked about the audacity of turning a Debussy piece into a bolero ... She told him she was reading Stoker’s Dracula. He had read it in school and was still struck by the episode of the count disembarking in London transformed into a dog. She agreed, and did not understand why Francis Ford Coppola had changed it in his unforgettable film.”
The Coppola reference is jarring. Márquez was verbally precise, having been a journalist, but much of his work dwelt in an old-fashioned, timeless world, inhabited by Paramaribo parrots, Parisian perfumes and animal-shaped sugar candies.
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Márquez had requested that Until August not be published. That he struggled with dementia at the end of his life is melancholy if one considers his obsession with memory and madness. In Hundred Years a plague of forgetfulness descends. The town’s aged founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is tied to a chestnut tree, playing chess with the ghost of the man he killed. It is as if, in Hundred Years, the 40-year-old Márquez was predicting his own conclusion.
By the time Until August made it to publication, several legendary figures entwined with Márquez had passed away, including Márquez’s cigarillo-smoking agent, Carmen Balcells, and Fidel Castro. (As an aside, in August, 1996, Márquez celebrated Castro’s 70th birthday by accompanying the revolutionary to lay flowers on his mother’s tomb.) Also deceased are Marquez’s translators Edith Grossman and Gregory Rabassa.
While Anne McClean – the translator of Until August – is excellent, Rabassa and Grossman were titans. Márquez preferred reading the English versions of Hundred Years and Love in the Time of Cholera; Rabassa and Grossman were notoriously finicky in their word choices. In 1999 Grossman translated Márquez’s story, Meeting in August, which became Until August’s first chapter, for the New Yorker. In McClean’s rendering Ana’s marriage is “well-matched” whereas in the Grossman’s, it is “harmonious”, appropriate to her Bach surname.
Broth features prominently in the Grossman and Rabassa translations. In Cholera, a character “would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory”. In Grossman, lovers sink into a “sweaty broth” and in McClean, they disassemble into a “soup of sweat”. Márquez, a compassionate recorder of femininity, falls flat with sex in Until August. “(She) devoured him for her own pleasure not even thinking of his.” This is from an author renowned for his toe-curling prose.
One must consider the ethics about posthumous publishing. Take Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and Franz Kafka who, when dying, entreated his agent to burn his manuscripts. However, we are enriched by the decision to print their works. Should you read Until August? If you love Márquez, absolutely. It is a testament to a genius striving in the winter of his powers. It is also decent, occasionally reminiscent of author Haruki Murakami, who positions magic in a mundane world. That Until August does not measure up to Márquez’s masterpieces is irrelevant.
There are musical fugues, and there are fugue states. Ana Magdalena, in her repetitive experiences, embarks upon a fugue, but her subsequent forgetfulness is a fugue state. Márquez, one surmises, uses the looping structure to combat his own memory lack. The final image of Until August contains an echo that will tickle fans. His editor, Cristobal Pera thanks Márquez “for his humanity, simplicity, and the affection he always served to everyone who approached thinking he was a god, demonstrating with a smile that he was a man”. Ultimately, the novel is a coda to a virtuoso mind and a wonderful life.
