Here is the posthumous novel by Gabriel García Márquez – Corriere.it

In an act of betrayal, we have decided to put readers’ enjoyment above all other considerations. If they appreciate it, it’s possible Gabo will forgive us. We’re counting on it.

Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garca Barcha, sons of Gabriel Garca Mrquez, disarm the reader. This material was RESTRICTED until published, researchers warned, in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where Garca Mrquez’s unpublished work lay dormant for 10 years. A short novel in six parts, a long novella? The heirs brought the great man’s memorabilia to Texas in 2014, immediately after his death. Included See you in Augustseveral drafts, including the final version, which was sent to his literary agent Carmen Balcells in 2004.

And now it’s here. The book, edited by Cristbal Pera, will be released worldwide on March 6th (translated in Italy by Bruno Arpaia for Mondadori) on the birthday of the Colombian writer and bears the title See you in August.

Ma Why did Garca Mrquez decide not to publish it even though he had already finished writing it in 2004? And because he published the first part in 1999 – an extraordinary event even for the New Yorker, which dedicated sixteen pages to the master – and then went back to work on the rest of the work, which, in his intention, should have completed the cycle that began with Love in times of cholera and continued with Of love and other demons?

He sent the final draft to his agent in 2004, ten years before his death, as certified by the University of Texas, but his health was already deteriorating: profoundly Therapies have proven they can stop a very aggressive form of lymphomaHe then had to deal with serious cognitive problems that impaired the mind’s extraordinary powers of imagination A hundred years of loneliness.

That was it the last work that the author approved for publicationstill alive, remains Remembering my sad bitches (The beginning is famous and, in the post-MeToo era, could have caused some difficulties even for a giant like him: When I turned ninety, I decided to treat myself to a night of crazy love with a virgin teenager.)

See you in August tells a simple story: the protagonist Ana Magdalena Bach – here the melomaniac Garca Mrquez winks at us readers: the name of the second wife of the great composer Johann Sebastian to whom he leaves the famous Notebook with the manuscripts of some minuets, ronds, sonatas, preludes, arias for soprano – he returns every summer, always on August 16th, to the island where his mother is buried.

Ana Magdalena is fifty-two years old, She has been married for 23 years and has been visiting her mother’s grave for 28 years on the small Caribbean island to bring her flowers, talk to her and ask questions, which then, due to the complete identification between her and her mother, find answers as if by magic in the following months – in a dream, or through a stranger had approached the market.

Grcia Mrquez’s themes are all there: Time, loneliness, love, fate and its twisting paths, superstition, music (Grieg’s piano concerto), prostitution (when Ana cheats on her husband for the first time, the man thinks she is a prostitute and leaves her twenty dollars in the copy of the book She reads, Dracula from Bram Stoker who humiliates her, a note that burns her like a red-hot ember).

For Gabo’s children, it is the right choice and they believe that this work is a testament to his talent and deserves to be presented to the public and not just a few authorized scholars, raising once again the age-old question of the author’s will. Of course, to quote the most famous case: Humanity owes Max Brod the decision to ignore the orders of his friend Franz Kafka, who wanted him to burn his unpublished works; And to cite the most recent case: TS Eliot scholars are reconsidering this great man’s work in light of the 1,100 letters he wrote to his beloved Emily Hale, letters which she – which enraged the otherwise cold gentleman – refused to destroy and which she did not want to destroy were made available to the researchers four years ago.

Nevertheless, there is a certain caution in the American literary world: perhaps because the chapter, published in 1999, was not yet considered a masterpiece at the time, perhaps because it appeared in the Italian version there are only sixty-eight completely unpublished pageswithout preface and critical apparatus with some interesting scans of the originals (and there is also Gabriel’s anastatic signature, which blackmails us a little by moving us).

A few months ago, at the Kosmopolis festival in Barcelona, ​​​​Spain, an author with the prestige of Salman Rushdie, without fear of controversy, declared that Gabo did not want this book to be published. When he wrote it, he was already suffering from senile dementia, and I’m worried about it getting into bookstores. I will say now that I left some of my incomplete manuscripts at the University of Austin that I don’t want to divulge.

Rushdie was a friend of Garca Mrquez who is considered the most read and popular writer since Dickens: in his career full of important awards and great reviews, he has always carried in his heart the phrase of the friend, according to which, now in my old age, I read contemporaries very little, but I never miss the new ones Books by Rushdie and Coetzee, a recognition that must be worth more to the Anglo-Indian author than the Nobel Prize that the Swedish Academy apparently does not want to award him.

And now we can – if we want – x-ray this book, do a CT scan and admit that there are some strangely fishy passages that The power of the greatest Mrquez’s prose is shown here only in small, fleeting glimpses blinding light – the Caribbean street with the fearless pigs and the naked children dodging them with bullfighting moves – but how much are these glimpses worth? And how much did we miss – how much do we miss – Garca Mrquez?

The ending – which can only shock those who don’t know it – is the most Garca Mrquez-esque ending we’ve read in the last twenty years., since he stopped publishing. Is what Ana Magdalena does on the last page of this strange and imperfect book an act of outrage? Of necrophilia? Of the love? A message from the author’s beyond? Garca Mrquez – through his children – asks us questions and asks us to make a decision.