Ten years after his death, Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) returns to wave to us with We will see each other in August, an unpublished short novel. The author of A hundred years of solitude (1967) and Love in the time of cholera (1985) had not produced anything since Memory of my sad whores (Grasset, 2005), his final book.
Ana Magdalena Bach has gone every August 16 since the death of her mother to carry a bouquet of gladioli to her grave, to a small Caribbean island where she has mysteriously chosen to be buried.
One evening, an unexpected adventure with a stranger surprises this married woman and mother of two children at the dawn of fifty, enchants her and leaves her senses alert. A night which opens his “eyes to the reality of his marriage, until then supported by a conventional happiness which avoided differences so as not to stumble against them, as one hides dust under the carpet”. The worm was in the apple. There will be other August 16ths, other men, without Ana Magdalena making it a tradition either.
This novel of barely a hundred pages could seem unfinished, it also contains certain repetitions and inconsistencies. But out of respect for the memory of the writer, his sons chose to preserve the manuscripts of We will see each other in August as approved and edited by their father in the early 2000s, before his mind began to desert him.
Despite everything, we find Gabriel García Márquez’s talent as a storyteller, his humor and his humanity almost intact.
In 1999, the Colombian writer read in public a first version of the first chapter of We will see each other in August. Gabriel García Márquez had the project of a novel composed of five autonomous stories with the same protagonist, Ana Magdalena Bach, whose common denominator would be the love stories of elderly people.
At the same time comes to us The writing workshop. How to tell a story, the report of a seven-day workshop led at the end of the 1980s by “Gabo”, as he was nicknamed, who never made a secret of his sympathies for Fidel Castro. In 1986, four years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Colombian writer created and financed an international film and television school in Cuba with a few friends in the small town of San Antonio de Los Baños.
He wanted to attract talent from all over Latin America, and even from elsewhere in the world, with the aim of competing with Hollywood production, of offering the world a story other than that ofAmerican way of life. The writer, for whom the creative process was most important in the world, he says, quickly got caught up in the game: “This thing of inventing stories together is now one of my vices! »
Here we see a modest and generous “Gabo” – even though he is addressing inexperienced screenwriters – to you and to you with the ten participants. A fascinating foray into the mind of the writer and a guided tour of the mysteries of creation.
We will see each other in August
★★★
Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gabriel Iaculli, Grasset, Paris, 2024, 144 pages
The writing workshop. How to tell a story
★★★1/2
Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Bernard Cohen, Seghers, Paris, 2024, 336 pages