We listen to the dead; we read their work, listen to their music, teach our children of the long lineage of the humanities. We are familiar with posthumous publication: previously unknown work can come into the public sphere though various ways, including the auction of intimate artifacts. Eventually, it is history that is the heir, and it is upon this premise that large recognition sometimes finds ecstatic work, such as that of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ten years after the author’s death, the heirs allowed publication of Until August (Borzoi, 2024) in an edition that also includes much commentary and the fascinating reproduction of the manuscript in revision. Categorized as a novel by the publisher, and as a novella in some reviews, the volume itself is a hardbound volume in a slightly odd trim size more often found in poetry and gift books than a work of some literary heft. There’s an interesting interplay between the lightness of the physical volume and the formidable reputation of the author, whose previous works have weightier physical presence.
Perhaps it is detrimental to an individual work to compare it to its siblings, works from the same artist, and reviews of Until August do contextualize this volume, with Max Liu’s commentary more about the circumstances of publication than the text, and ending with this damning conclusion: “Usually, an underwhelming posthumous publication or minor work by a major author…will delight fans. I do not believe this is true of Until August. Gabriel Garcia Marquez knew this and was right not to want it to see the light of day. His family and his publishers should have respected his wishes.” A slightly softer view was taken by Art Edwards, who opens his remarks on how titles can seem “monumental”, how “these titles offered a sense that the heart of literature beat strongly”. After a deeper look into the text itself, Edwards concludes that the work has a “portended tragedy” that is “the kind of pathos” expected of a Nobel laureate. And while the Kirkus review dismisses the work as “a lyrical rom-com”, another for The Guardian makes the assertation that the protagonists’ motivation “isn’t a psychologically complex sating of unmet appetites” and mentions the family relationship of the protagonist, as if the one is a de facto dismissal of the other.
Perhaps the most insightful remark about the work is Edwards’s admission that “Marquez’s efforts take on a feminist tone”, and it is this aspect which has reviewers reaching for their hems and pearls. The text opens with the protagonist, who bathes after travel in the third paragraph. While reviewers have focused on the character’s self-appraisal of her breasts as being “still round and high”, they seem to have ignored the modifier of “in spite of two pregnancies”, or the further intimate view of “she stretched her cheeks back with the heels of her hands to remind herself what she’d looked like when young” (pg. 5).
The challenge to the reader is also as intimate, upon what shall the gaze fall when looking at a woman. Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself gives us a vision of the protagonist’s “autumnal, motherly face” and “skin without a trace of cosmetics had the color and texture of molasses” (5-6), but it is three more paragraphs until the character is named, and that is after the first mention of the work’s significant date, the 16th of August, notable in Caribbean history.
The sense of history is imbued in the text, most overtly through the setting. While the first paragraph sets the central location as a “destitute village, with its mud-walled shacks, palm-thatch roofs, and streets of burning sand beside a sea in flames”, the village itself becomes one where “the almond trees looked like they were decorated for Christmas with garlands of colored lights, and the patio was cheerful with young people of every stripe, blond girls with their black boyfriends, and resigned old married couples” (63). The reader experiences the village over time through the six episodes of the text, and this fluidity allows for the history of the protagonist to occur as well.
It is too dismissive to the text to not consider the elegant care with which Marquez reveals that the plot of this work is the characterization of the protagonist. The second episode begins with “She would never be the same” (24); however, the second paragraph again focuses on the setting of “the port, so narrow and so familiar since her school days (25) before both reader and protagonist, Ana Magdalena, “became aware that the changes were not to the world but to herself” (27). The novella progresses through the annual ritual, which structures the text, with the protagonist finally realizing “the extent to which she was starting to feel like a stranger in her own family” (93). Marquez further heightens the character’s tension in the fifth chapter, which begins “The next August 16 was now set to be her destiny” (76) and where “she suddenly realized that on the twenty-fifth of November she would turn fifty, the age she most feared, not much younger than her mother had been when she died” (81). In addition, with “her husband…[ending] up being only a casual guest in her bed” (93), Marquez has isolated the character as she, herself realizes her isolation when she remarks: “At my age…all women are alone” (106).
While reviewers seemed to miss the mark in their author-guess, in sensing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella as akin to other masterworks, it’s ironic that this taboo text seems most akin to Chopin’s The Awakening, and certain views of this work are comparable to the original castigation and censuring of Chopin’s now influential novel. Marquez’s character, Ana, demonstrates this point when she “cried herself to sleep furious with herself for the disgrace of being a woman in a man’s world” (108). However, it would be an injustice to also not note how the grave of Ana’s mother is a pivotal element, providing both the bones of the plot and the climatic realization of “Ana Magdalena saw herself in the open casket as if she were looking in a full-length mirror” (109). Marquez repeats this sense of matriarchal inheritance, almost quoting Anne Sexton’s “a woman is her mother” (“Housewife”) with the climactic line “She did not feel sad but rather encouraged by the realization that the miracle of her life was to have continued that of her dead mother” (102).
Marquez does not imply that matriarchal lives are an immutable fate, as the protagonist’s daughter’s life path is decidedly different. What is clear here is the arc of the narrative is the protagonist finding sexual self-determination: controversial for Chopin, and maybe for Sexton, and as apparently controversial today, a hundred years and counting, still.
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