I have been nestling in my hand a 110-page book on which rides the posthumous reputation of a heavyweight author of authors: Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, martyred nearly 10 years ago to the day to literature’s marcha inmortalidad. Eleven more pages are dedicated to a sort of breathless winging-it justification for the publishing of the book by Cristóbal Pera, its editor. And five more pages to presenting “four sample facsimile pages” from version five of Márquez’s En agosto nos vemos (See you in August), on the title page of which he had scrawled “Gran OK final” (Great OK final) with a spiky certainty that looks nothing like his usual rounded cursive.
So where, you ask, is the problem? Márquez is hardly the first posthumously-published author. There have been innumerable, some of them so outstanding that the world would be vastly the poorer without them. But the exceptional Márquez is in the company of the exceptional: those published unwillingly after death, their last wishes for their manuscripts to be defied.
“This book doesn’t work,” he had told his two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha. “It must be destroyed.” Márquez had finished the fifth and final draft in 2004, a decade before his passing. Before he died, subverted by an inexorable decade of dementia and unable to recognise anyone but his wife Mercedes—even his own writings increasingly defamiliarised—he ordered his book begone. Although he had always been ruthless with his self-indulgence, this was uncharacteristic. He was a gem-polisher, not a discarder. His sons shunted his drafts, a doorstop at 769 pages, to his archives at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, where they lay open to scholarship but not to publishing.
A year later, he said that 2005 “was the first [year] in my life in which I haven’t written even a line. With my experience, I could write a new novel without any problems, but people would realise my heart wasn’t in it”. In 2008, clearly bushed by unrelenting output, he told his fans, “It’s a lot of work for me to write books.” In 2009, his longstanding agent Carmen Balcells said, “I don’t think that García Márquez will write anything else.” Márquez’s biographer Gerald Martin added, “I also believe that Gabo won’t write any more books, but I don’t think this is too regrettable.”
Carmen Balcells—who handled Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and represented six Nobel winners—died in 2015 aged 85, a doyenne of the star-blessed Boom latinoamericano of 1959-71, with Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Márquez as its, and her, drum-majors. She was fiercely protective of the man affectionately known as Gabo. However, disencumbered of her untameable ownership of Márquez, her Barcelona-based Agencia Carmen Balcells would go on to sell his North American rights to Knopf in 2023, while the manuscript was still being polished.
Knopf wasn’t in Balcells’ sights. She had been confabulating with Andrew Wylie in 2014, the year before her demise. Here is where things get interesting, as they can only get with shadowy big publishing. While no one quite knows why Balcells and Wylie didn’t tie the literary knot, in 2015 the Andrew Wylie Agency España was set up to handle Spanish-language authors. Hired to helm it editorially was Cristóbal Pera, who was known to have an excellent rapport with Márquez’s sons.
Then Knopf became the dark horse, nicked Cristóbal Pera, and made him the editor of Until August even as it co-opted Márquez’s sons with the insidious aplomb of big capital.
Meanwhile, the lives of Márquez and Balcells finally mirrored each other. As Márquez’s sons took over his estate—their mother having followed their father in 2020—Balcells’ son Lluís Miquel Palomares took over the work of shepherding her writers, despite being not very interested.
The sons of two luminaries connected at the hip came together to deny each the pleasure of the ultimate wish—the brothers Barcha Márquez’s and Palomares Balcells’. Thus was born Until August, a book neither the author nor his publishing representative wanted to see the light of day.
It is deeply saddening that Márquez’s novella—a collection of set pieces with a protagonist as the ringmistress—should be so underwhelming when other writers whose incomplete novels were posthumously published had more salutary fates. Roberto Bolaño never said of his unfinished masterpiece 2666 a month before his death in 2003, “There are more than a thousand pages I have to correct. It’s a job for a 19th century miner.” Published a year later, it made his reputation. Franz Kafka told his friend Max Brod, whom he had named the administrator of his estate, to burn his unpublished work. A year after Kafka’s death in 1924, Brod had The Trial published; the year after, The Castle; and Amerika in 1927. Brod’s intransigence settled Kafka’s reserved doubts about his work.
But it is difficult not to understand why Márquez wanted this manuscript buried. Lit by his ability to pack many thoughts in a phrase, the motes of his words rise off the page, but only here and there. There are clunkers aplenty that he would never have let pass, marginalia he would have marginalised. I could find only one paragraph that was truly, ineffably redolent of Márquez.
“We did think about it for about three seconds…. We decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that’s what children are for.” Perhaps it might be wise not to leave the management of legacies to the managers of estates.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist