Until August by Gabriel García Márquez review – his abandoned last novel

“This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” Not a one-star rant from the bowels of Amazon or Goodreads, but rather the verdict of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez on his now posthumously published novel, Until August, a breezy romp brewed in his 70s and previously excerpted by the New Yorker in 1999 after he read from it on stage in Madrid with the late José Saramago.

The erotic adventures of a middle-aged mother, it was originally conceived as a five-part narrative more than 600 pages long, but was set aside so García Márquez could finish Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005), the final novel he published in his lifetime. From 2003, work resumed on and off; before his death in 2014, by which time he had lived with dementia for 10 years, he revisited it in a race between “perfectionism and his vanishing mental facilities”, his sons’ foreword tells us. If dementia left García Márquez unable to complete the book to his satisfaction, then perhaps the condition also made it harder for him to judge the book’s merit, his sons suggest; finding the novel valuable, they’ve chosen either way to ignore their father’s wishes and prioritise “readers’ pleasure”, having also let Netflix adapt his landmark magic-realist saga One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), against the author’s longtime refusal to have it screened.

An editorial afterword explains how the intimate, decidedly non-epic entertainment now before us – a brisk and frisky tale of extramarital sex doubling as a parable of parental inscrutability – was sewn together from García Márquez’s fifth draft and a document preserving offcuts from prior attempts. The smooth-reading result is the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, who every August leaves her unnamed country on the Atlantic coast for 24 hours on the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother chose to be buried. She takes a ferry to lay flowers on her mother’s grave before returning to her husband – which leaves plenty of time for a yearly one-night stand, as twinkly dancefloor flirtations give way to steamy hotel-room tussles and gnawing regrets played out in comically fraught pillow talk back home.

Most agonising of all for Ana Magdalena is her first, unrepeatably thrilling hook-up with a man who cheapens the memory with his parting gift of a $20 bill. If she cringes, sometimes the reader does, too. By page three, García Márquez has her gazing at her own breasts (“round and high in spite of two pregnancies”); soon she’s reaching hungrily for what he calls (in Anne McLean’s English) her lover’s “resting creature”. Another partner gives her “a supernatural pleasure that left her threshed and burning” (“At his first thrust she felt herself die... as if she were a calf being carved up”).

Well... it’s all part of the quirky knockabout vigour that is García Márquez’s storytelling fuel. Madame Bovary this is not: Ana Magdalena’s infidelity isn’t a psychologically complex sating of unmet appetites so much as a way to just plug the book into the mains. When we’re told that she and her husband, an orchestra conductor, make “reckless love... like teenagers” in “assignation motels, sometimes the most refined but just as often the sleaziest, until one night when the place was robbed at gunpoint and they were left stark naked”, the line is typical: what for other novelists might supply an entire plot is for García Márquez merely half a sentence’s throwaway flourish.

The same goes for the moment when Ana Magdalena discovers that one of her lovers is a murderous sex predator, or the passage in which – having guiltily prodded her husband to own up to a betrayal of his own – she longs to kill him as well as his lover, “not with a merciful gunshot, but by carving them up bit by bit into transparent slices with a meat guillotine”.

Rest assured, Until August isn’t that kind of novel either. But while the overall ambience might be sunny, sultry, even tipsy, there’s a genuine sting when we learn why Ana Magdalena’s mother – described as a teacher who “never in her entire life wanted to be anything more” – decided she wanted to be buried on the island. Her daughter reckons it was the panorama provided by the cemetery’s altitude – a kind of company in solitude – and ultimately her hunch isn’t so far off the mark. Another jolt lies in the surreal payoff, which is entirely García Márquez’s own, chosen in 2010, his editor states, contra the belief of García Márquez’s agent (cited in the afterword) that her client didn’t have an ending; satisfyingly symmetrical, it lends this gentle diversion the depth of fable.