García Márquez was clear: “This book is of no use. It must be destroyed.” Millions of readers around the world, in all languages, from Barcelona to Sydney and from Aracataca to Beijing, will celebrate starting tomorrow that his blessed sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, finally ignored him and decided to publish ‘See you in August’ (Random House), a short novel starring a middle-aged woman (specifically, 46 years old) who travels every August 16 to the island where her mother is buried to leave her a bouquet of gladioli.
What happens is that (in case you doubted it, it is a love novel), in the first chapter, Ana Magdalena Bach (that is the name of the protagonist), a happily married woman, will get involved with a man, committing her first infidelity. marriage of his life.
From there, the novel – of which ‘La Vanguardia’ published a preview in 2014 – is structured by years: every August 16, Ana Magdalena goes to the island, where she has an affair with a different man, and this It will transform it (and we can read up to this point).
“I hope and trust that my father will forgive us,” says Gonzalo García Barcha, in a hotel in Madrid, acknowledging his “betrayal.” “For eight years we didn’t even talk about this book in the family,” he reveals, “the originals could be freely consulted at the University of Texas in Austin. But, a couple of years ago, we, the editor Cristóbal Pera and the editor, decided to read it carefully. the Balcells agency, to make a decision. We saw that it was necessary to do some editing work but that there was a publishable version, that it was not true that the book had to be finished by Gabo. It did not seem fair that only those scholars who traveled could read it. to Austin. There would always have been Gabo’s ‘mysterious novel.’ there”.
The reason that ‘See You In August’ is unfinished is the relentless illness that was corroding the author’s memory in the last years of his life. “That was a source of despair for him – remembers his son -, he said that memory was both his raw material and his tool and that, without it, he was left with nothing. But who knows – he points out – if that same lack of faculties was what prevented him from realizing how good the book was.
The version of the book that is published, with the due corrections and adjustments, is part of what Gabo himself numbered as the fifth and which he left ready on July 5, 2004, with the handwritten note that says ‘Big Final OK’. Despite this, he introduced some more changes in the digital version in Word that his secretary, Mónica Alonso, kept on a floppy disk. Editor Pilar Reyes believes that the author made corrections until 2008.
‘See you in August’ can be seen as the opposite of ‘Memory of my sad whores’ (2004), his last fiction book published during his lifetime, in which they give a virgin prostitute to an old man for his birthday. Here, the protagonist is an empowered, strong, mature woman who makes decisions about her sexuality. Ana Magdalena Bach – be careful: the first exclusive female protagonist of a García Márquez novel – is the only axis of the book, not a woman in the middle of a choral story. “Gabo is much more cruel with the man of the ‘…sad whores’ than with Ana Magdalena,” says Gonzalo, who sees links in both works: “The sexuality of the mature person, whether an old man or a woman in middle age.” Here, in addition, “he enters into topics such as his sexuality. His vanity, his relationship with his mother and with his daughter…”. “Gabo considered himself a feminist,” Rodrigo García Barcha stated today, in a press conference in which he spoke by zoom from Los Angeles with his brother Gonzalo in Madrid.
As in a game of mirrors, if prostitution is something very present in ‘Memory of my sad whores’, on the other hand in ‘See you in August’ the biggest offense that the protagonist receives is when one of the men she sleeps with Leave a 20 dollar bill on the table.
Continuing with the comparison between both books, in the first the location “seems more Barranquilla while here it seems more Cartagena de Indias, which has many islands in front. We see the evolution of that poor and underdeveloped but paradisiacal place that is becoming touristy. When describes those hotels with rooms full of buttons that look like spaceships, I see my parents going crazy in one of those places.
The men who parade by the protagonist’s bed are like a kind of tests or lessons that she overcomes, that transform her. In addition to sex, Ana Magdalena practices reading and reads “books that my father really liked. There is no other book by Gabo where he pays so many tributes to the literature that he liked, also in the musical references,” especially Debussy.
Will there be more surprises? Can more Nobel writings appear? “Nothing,” Gonzalo responds bluntly, “there is nothing left” and admits that he has not been able to read ‘The Boom Letters’, the volume published by Alfaguara that collects the letters exchanged between Gabo, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar and Fuentes. “I have tried to read it… but there is something there as a transgressor that has prevented me from doing so, I will get over it one day.”
-You are a discreet man, who has always wanted to be in the background. But what has it been like to be the son of God, Gonzalo?
-Over the years, one is more immunized and older and is able to receive it with more affection and love. Above all, I appreciate the enormous affection that people have for him. Let’s say I’ve already psychoanalyzed myself enough. When I was young I was different… I am the son of a writer and the father of a writer (Mateo García Elizondo), my other children are an actress and musician, my wife is a photographer, my brother Rodrigo is a film director in Hollywood… But I am a designer, editor and typographer, jobs in which you must be invisible, not become an obstacle for others’ work to be seen. I have always tried to keep a low profile, not to appear in public much, so that if the font of ‘See you in August’ is mine it does not matter… I am making an exception now with this novel… and no more.
Rodrigo García Barcha adds that “our father was very worried that his fame would sink us. It is easier to be the son of someone like him, no matter how famous he was, than of a bad father.”
The great public presentation of the book will be on Wednesday the 6th, the day of its release, in Barcelona – a city where Gonzalo, who spent eight years of his childhood there, does not stop coming every year – at the Gabriel García Library Márquez, in an event (6:30 p.m.) in which, in addition to Gonzalo García Barcha, the writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, the editor Pilar Reyes, the actress Bárbara Lennie (who will read fragments of the work) and the musical ensemble Ana Magdalena Ensemble will participate. . Given the enormous expectation that the novel has created, prior reservation is required.
