This is especially disappointing, because his late fiction possesses a desperate and dreamlike emotional range that sets it apart from his earlier work. The novella “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” (2004), the last book of fiction published during his lifetime, is an engrossing portrait of a lifelong bachelor who at 90 falls in love for the first time. The recipient of his adoration is a 14-year-old girl; the old man pays to watch her sleep. It is an aging writer’s fantasy: With the discovery of love, the narrator, who has worked for decades as a hack journalist with a weekly column at the local newspaper, discovers the secret of speaking directly to the souls of his readers. The faint scenes between Ana and her husband in “Until August” made me nostalgic for the hallucinatory quality of that novella and even more so for the unforgettable section in “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985), when the couple doesn’t speak for weeks after arguing about a bar of soap, a disagreement that is packed with the rancor of a thousand marital obstinacies and slights.
If you agree that the dead have no rights, as both natural and written laws stipulate, then you may argue that by not destroying the drafts of “Until August” when he had the chance, the author’s wishes have been rendered irrelevant. This oversight on García Márquez’s part does seem unusual. He was an assiduous shaper of his public image, clothing himself in an armor of apocrypha, while destroying most of the written traces of his private life “and even,” according to his biographer Gerald Martin, “his professional literary activity.” The letters he wrote to his wife, Mercedes Barcha, during their courtship amounted to 650 pages. A few weeks after they married, García Márquez, worried that “someone might get hold of them,” persuaded her to burn the letters, though he was still unknown. One speculates that he simply forgot to get rid of the drafts of “Until August”he had compiled.
Reading “Until August” is a bit like watching a great dancer, well past his prime, marking his ineradicable elegance in a few moves he can neither develop nor sustain. This is most keenly felt in the second half, when the author’s command of his subject slips and the story rushes to its hackneyed conclusion. One can almost pinpoint the place where the thread attaching author to subject unravels, as he repeats tropes and images, and the generation of new material falls beyond his grasp.
García Márquez’s work has survived legions of imitators who have misunderstood magic realism as a stylistic mannerism rather than the means to a sharper, less omniscient reality. Much of what is thought of as “magical” in his novels reflects life as his characters believed it to be in the Caribbean towns he so vividly described. Now, his literary guardians have put in front of the world the indignity of García Márquez imitating himself. Luckily, his intelligence and exceptional use of language have ensured that his best work remains undiminished. If you’re unfamiliar with that work, a feast of originality and sheer inventiveness awaits you. The value of “Until August” may ultimately be to give readers the chance to mourn anew the passing of a beloved writer.
UNTIL AUGUST | By Gabriel García Márquez | Translated by Anne McLean | Knopf | 129 pp. | $22