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In his lifetime, Gabriel García Márquez decided that his final novel should not be published. The Columbian writer — one of the greatest of the 20th century, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1982 — had been living with dementia, although he continued to work. After his death in 2014 at the age of 87, this final manuscript joined his archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, remaining hidden from view, in accordance with his wishes.
Yet 10 years after his death, the book, now titled Until August, will appear this month. His sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, overrode their father’s request. “Until August was the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds,” they have said. Reading it, they found — despite any shortcomings — that it still reflected “his capacity for invention, his poetic language, his captivating storytelling, his understanding of humankind and his affection for our experiences and misadventures”.
Are his heirs right to disregard his wishes? Is the book’s publication a mark of disrespect or (whisper it) evidence of a desire to cash in? Plainly put, you might say it doesn’t matter: García Márquez is beyond caring or knowing. That’s death for you.
The rest of us, readers and scholars of literature and neuroscience alike, will now have a chance not only to see this final work but to understand a little too, perhaps, how his devastating illness affected his creative powers. Comparison might be made with American television writer David Milch’s remarkable memoir Life’s Work, just published in paperback. It is a masterclass on the author’s process: but also reckons with the damage of his dementia and was written with the help of his wife and children.
An author’s legacy is never fixed; and it is important to note that a lesser book, if we are to judge it so, will not affect the reputation of a greater one. The last fiction that García Márquez published in his lifetime, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) was not warmly received: “a halfhearted exercise in storytelling, published simply to mark time”, wrote an acid Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Yet his other work remains undiminished and enduring; and what is minor can cast light on the major.
Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman appeared in 2015, the year before her death, and it seemed unclear how involved she had been in its release: while not a posthumous publication, it had the air of one. Until that point she had, of course, published only a single book, and that one of the most storied of the 20th century — the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960.
Initially Watchman was promoted as a “sequel” to its predecessor — a somewhat puzzling positioning, as it soon became clear that the novel was, in essence, a first draft of Mockingbird, its true strength drawn out over the course of years by her editor at Lippincott, Tay Hohoff.
Watchman on its own is a minor work; yet it illuminates Mockingbird — not least because, in the 21st century, the novel’s white saviour narrative is much more problematic. Watchman revealed that Atticus Finch — hitherto perceived as one of the great moral figures of American literature — attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting in his youth; and that he thought efforts to desegregate the South were moving too fast. When the news broke — and it was big news — my then 14-year-old son called me from school: “Mom, is Atticus Finch a racist?” Watchman shows that Finch could not avoid being a man of his time.
Franz Kafka asked Max Brod, his literary executor, to burn his papers after his death: had Brod complied, we would not have The Castle or The Trial. Ted Hughes destroyed some of Sylvia Plath’s journals: an act of protection or of desecration? At the centenary of JD Salinger’s birth, in 2019, his son Matt Salinger told me — and the world — that he intends to gradually release his father’s unpublished work.
Will our understanding of the author of The Catcher in the Rye be revolutionised? It’s unlikely, though what appears will doubtless be fascinating. Is Salinger’s memory slighted by his son? I reckon not. We can only be glad, surely, when our knowledge of an artist’s work expands, and further complexity — in these all-too-binary times — is added into the mix.
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