In 2004, at 77 years old and with all the fame in the world on his shoulders, Gabriel García Márquez sent his literary agent Carmen Balcells the draft of what ended up being his last novel, In August See You (Random House, at sale on March 6). It had been a ritual for more than thirty years. García Márquez wanted to know the opinion of Kame’s manuscript, as he affectionately called his agent. What he sent her was not the final version, but it was the version with a final. The novel was finished, although it needed polishing, and García Márquez knew it better than anyone.
For the past ten years I have studied the manuscripts of García Márquez’s novels, short stories, speeches, and journalistic articles preserved in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogotá. I have learned in detail how he wrote, among others, the manuscripts of The Colonel Has No One to Write to Him, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and of course One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel about which I wrote a biography. in English, Ascent to glory, which will be released in Spanish next year.
In addition to the manuscripts of Gabo, as he is popularly known, I have also examined the manuscripts of Fortunata and Jacinta by Pérez Galdós, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Kew Gardens by Woolf, As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, and Hopscotch by Cortázar. I have looked closely at the hand-corrected proofs of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Joyce’s Ulysses. With no less fervor, I read the pages written in tiny letters of Los Rivero, Borges’ unfinished story that could have become the novel he never wrote.
I have read these and other manuscripts and documents with obsessive care, and I learned that if something characterizes these masters of literature, it is their uncontrollable passion for telling us a story and an exquisite respect for the word. His manuscripts also reveal to us that the paths to writing a text, from the initial idea to the final point, are multiple and sinuous. In the case of García Márquez, what makes his way of writing unique is his way of rewriting his texts.
I have not seen the ability that Gabo had to self-edit, to correct what was written with the eyes of the most rigorous editor, in the manuscripts of other writers. Of Fortunata and Jacinta de Galdós, only two manuscript versions and the printing proofs remain. In the case of Gabo, there are eighteen versions of Memoria de mis putas tristes. And in each new version you can see how, word by word, scratch by scratch, rewriting by rewriting, the magic of that style emerges that continues to hypnotize millions of readers.
With each revision of the manuscript, García Márquez tried to make a leap in quality in the story. It was an almost artisanal work, always in search of the compliant and surprising word. In fact, in the photos where he appears writing in his study, there were always all kinds of dictionaries next to him. Consulting them was, according to what he says in his memoirs, Living to Tell It, a habit inherited from his grandfather, who used to look up the unequivocal meaning of words in his dictionary.
Readers are lucky because In August See Us contains the magic of Gabo’s style. It surprises us with unthinkable combinations between words, with musical phrases and with dazzling passages that will stick in our memory. He is the usual García Márquez accountant, but in the autumn of his almost eighty years. At that moment, as his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo remind us in the prologue to the novel, his main raw material and work tool, memory, was consumed without hope. In that memory, Gabo stored his own dictionary created after sixty years of writing. Feeling it erased must have been as painful for him as it was for Beethoven to go deaf.
Although the magic of the narrative is diminished by his illness, it does not mean that the manuscripts of In August See You stop having their own magic. In fact, the different versions of a novel that was left without a complete self-publishing are the best and most transparent opportunity to understand how García Márquez really wrote.
In these versions, which I first read in 2017 and then in 2019 and 2022, Gabo wonders if “bumping around” is the exact way to describe how the taxi that takes the protagonist, Ana Magdalena Bach, travels to a hotel. . He also thought and rethought whether she should be forty or fifty years old. He eliminated the word infidelity so as not to plant stigmas in the readers’ imagination. He changed the names of the characters: Narcissus became Gaston. He did not develop the idea of ??a meeting with a lesbian. He took entire paragraphs from one chapter and grafted them onto another. But perhaps the most impressive thing is to admire how words that are just impressionistic brushstrokes, like a telegram, come to life on the paper.
Furthermore, García Márquez used to make very strong changes in the later versions. For example, in the final manuscript of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he changed the name of the protagonist, Santiago Aragonés, to Santiago Nasar. What would have been the final text of See You in August if your health had spared you? García Márquez took the answer with him, but thanks to the careful work of the Spanish editor Cristóbal Pera, the writer’s closest collaborator in his final books, readers around the world will have the last and happy opportunity to meet again with a new story. by García Márquez.
