We’ll see you in August | A posthumous García Márquez

A few years before he died, in 2014, Gabriel García Márquez asked his two sons not to publish the novel he was working on, We will see each other in August. Twelve years after the disappearance of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, they disobeyed him. Explanations.

Why didn’t García Márquez want his latest novel to be published?

Because he suffered in his last years from dementia. “He started having memory problems while writing Live to tell the tale [son autographie publiée en 2002] “, explains Álvaro Santana-Acuña, professor of sociology at Whitman College in Washington State, who was involved in the evaluation of this posthumous novel. “When Memory of my sad whores appeared [en 2004]he had difficulty finishing his ideas. And from 2005 onwards, he had difficulty remembering the titles of his novels. “It should be noted that García Márquez had begun working on We will see each other in August in the 1990s and had read passages from it at a conference at Georgetown University in 1997.

Why did his sons decide to publish it?

“Sons betray their fathers,” explained “Gabo’s” eldest son, Rodrigo García, in an interview with the Chilean daily The Tercera. Mr. Garcia, who is a director, also exploits the theme of the betrayal of sons in his film. Familyavailable since last December on Netflix. Mr. García did not want to give interviews to the French-speaking press.

Álvaro Santana-Acuña saw the manuscript of We will see each other in August in 2017 by consulting the García Márquez documentary collection at the University of Texas. It was acquired by the Austin institution in 2014 for the writing of an essay on the writing of One hundred years of solitude, novel that made the Colombian writer and journalist famous. “I found the voice of García Márquez, even if it didn’t have the perfection of his other novels,” says Álvaro Santana-Acuña. “That was the opinion of other specialists in his work. The family ended up taking note of this fairly unanimous point of view.”

What is the story of We will see each other in August ?

Every year in August, a woman in her forties takes the ferry to lay flowers on her mother’s grave on an island. One night, she has an affair with a stranger and betrays her husband. She repeats the experience in the following summers, all the while reflecting on her mother’s affection for this Caribbean island.

As Memory of my sad whoresthe novel explores the impact of aging on sexuality. This is a major difference from the first nine novels of García Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Apart from his work as a journalist, García Márquez was known for his “magical realism”, which he shares with other South American novelists. These are normal plots with supernatural elements, sometimes peripheral. The term was first proposed in Germany in the 1920s, in relation to painters.

How does it differ from other novels by Gabriel García Márquez?

“It’s not perfected in the typical García Márquez way,” Santana-Acuña illustrates. “When you read his novels published before the mid-1990s, each chapter was completely finished, and yet everything came together perfectly. There were no gaps, no white spaces.”

Normally, García Márquez would do at least a dozen drafts of his novels. “For Memory of my sad whoreshe did 18 drafts, says Santana-Acuña. And on the seventh draft, he started over. There were only five drafts for We will see each other in August. So it was a lot less work than usual.”

The worries of We will see each other in August are also found in his 2002 autobiography and his 2004 novel. “You can’t ask for a masterpiece every time,” Mr. Santana-Acuña says.

Are there any other unpublished manuscripts by García Márquez?

The family says no. García Márquez destroyed manuscripts that he was desperate to finish, according to Rodrigo García. “There are posthumous writings in the archives, but not as important and long as We will see each other in August “, explains Mr. Santana-Acuña.

Born in 1927 into a bourgeois family in a small town in northern Colombia, García Márquez published the first of his 11 novels in 1955, Leaves in the squall. Among his other best-known books are: Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Some posthumous controversies

Franz Kafka

His friend Max Brod disobeyed him and did not burn his manuscripts after his death, as Kafka had requested. This saved several masterpieces, such as The trial. When he died in 1924 at the age of 40, the German-language Prague writer had published, among his major works, only Metamorphosis. He had burned most of his manuscripts, unable to imagine that he would complete them to his satisfaction. Brod, a university friend of Kafka, was his literary executor.

Vladimir Nabokov

In 2009, his son published against his last wishes Laura’s originala novel left unfinished 32 years after his death. The author of Lolita had started working there in 1974 and had completed 138 note cards (index cards) upon his death. Literary circles at the time cited an illustrious precedent for Dmitri Nabokov’s decision: the intervention, according to some sources, of the Roman Emperor Augustus to prevent the destruction of the manuscript of theAeneid by Virgil, an epic about the founding of Rome, after the disappearance of the great poet of Antiquity.

Nelly Arcan

Shortly after her death in 2009, the publication of an unfinished novel was mentioned by her publisher at Seuil, which caused an outcry. The Quebec novelist had sent him 40 pages and the Parisian publisher had assumed that the rest could be on her computer. Faced with the controversy, he declared to The Press that he intended to respect the wishes of Nelly Arcan’s family. The publication ultimately did not take place.