MADRID: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s posthumous novel was a daunting challenge for the award-winning Colombian writer as he neared death 10 years ago, his sons said.

“Until August,” the final book by the Nobel prize winning giant of Latin American “magical realism,” is being released in its original Spanish as “En agosto nos vemos” on Wednesday, and in English later this month.

Fifteen years before his 2014 death, the affectionately nicknamed “Gabo” began writing the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle aged woman who visits her mother’s grave every August on a Caribbean island, taking advantage of the trips to leave aside her family life and have erotic trysts with strangers.

In 1999 he read the first chapter publicly but, unsatisfied with the rest of the work, he declined to publish it. Instead, he handed versions of the manuscript over to his relatives.

The author, who earned international renown for novels like “Love in the Time of Cholera,” considered his last book a “mess” to be discarded, sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha said on Tuesday in an online press event from Spain.

The book “became an indecipherable little thing” in the final years of his life, which were marked by illness and memory loss, Rodrigo said. But close relatives decided to keep the manuscript and other fragments of “Until August” at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive and library at the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States.

According to Gonzalo Garcia, academics who read parts of the work convinced the brothers to unify them into a book, to be released on what would have been their father’s 97th birthday.

“When we read the versions (again) we realised that the book was much better than we remembered,” Gonzalo Garcia said. “We began to suspect that, just as Gabo lost the ability to write, he also lost his ability to read” as well as the “ability to judge” his own writings, he added.

‘Archeology’

The book’s Spanish version is being released on Wednesday, while the English version hits bookstores on March 20, according to Pilar Reyes, editorial director of Penguin Random House.

While it was rumored “Until August” did not have an ending, Garcia Marquez’s children said that before his death he fully developed the story of his protagonist Ana Magdalena Bach.

“The novel was, if anything, a little scattered in an indeterminate number of originals, but it was complete,” Gonzalo Garcia stressed. It was “a work of archeology” to bring the pieces together and arrive at an ending, he said. Rodrigo predicted there are no more hidden Garcia Marquez novels waiting in the wings. “Until August” is “the last survivor” of his literary oeuvre.

Garcia Marquez, who died in Mexico City, is considered one of the world’s most revered authors, the main engine in a major Latin American literary wave that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Streaming platform Netflix will premier a series this year inspired by his masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2024