Rediscovering Márquez

I was thrilled to learn last month that Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s sons and editors had decided to publish posthumously Until August, a work of fiction he left behind with instructions not to publish it. As an avid fan of Márquez’s, I read it quickly (it is only about 20,000 words). I have since been feeling elated at rediscovering the master. Until August surely does not compare with The General in His Labyrinth or Love in the Time of Cholera, but is quintessential Márquez nonetheless. I do not believe that The New York Times review, which called it “unsatisfying”, did it justice.
 

Until August is difficult to classify beyond calling it a work of fiction. There is basically only one character, Ana Magdalena Bach, still beautiful at 46, with a marriage of 27 years, successful for all apparent purposes. The plot is gossamer-thin: She visits every August a small Caribbean island to lay flowers on her mother’s grave, and has sex with an unknown man that night before returning to her placid family life. So what is the big deal?
 

The big deal is we get to experience all over again Márquez’s unparalleled gift for words, narratives and characterisation, and his recurring leitmotifs of innocence and loneliness. In just a few sentences, he makes the island, its dilapidated old structures and the gleaming new ones, its hills and rocky streets, the unpredictable sea surrounding it come alive. And of course, Ana Magdalena: “Her skin without a trace of cosmetics had the colour and texture of molasses, and her topaz eyes were beautiful with their dark Portuguese lids.” Her husband is a successful musicologist, her son a musician in high demand, her daughter a free-spirited nymph who nevertheless enters a convent. But she is still lonely: “From the moment she entered the house, she discovered the extent to which she was starting to feel like a stranger in her own family … the strangest paradox was discovering that she was losing the illusion of the island.” 
 

Márquez offers no explanation except to hint that this may have been a trait Ana Magdalena inherited from her mother along with “the splendour of her golden eyes, the virtue of being a woman of few words and the intelligence to manage her temper”. Ana Magdalena exhumes her mother’s remains and carries them home, the inexorable end to this tale. 
 

Innocence and its healing power is a recurring Márquez theme. His One Hundred Years of Solitude ends with the destruction of the magical village of Macondo, its patriarch, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, facing a firing squad, but not before hailing the purity and innocence of Ursula, the Colonel’s wife as the saving grace. In Love in the Time of Cholera, based on his own parents’ courtship, the love affair between two young people faces family resistance, he moves along, she marries a doctor approved, and eventually, the two meet again after the doctor’s death, to resume from where they left off half a century ago. The seemingly mushy plot is embellished with such imagery and allusive power that it becomes a rapturous ode to life over death, all due to its innocence.
 

Yet the most powerful and repeated Márquez theme is the descent of seeming saviours of an impoverished people into tyrants who die unmourned. The General in Hs Labyrinth tells us of the last months in the life of Simon de Bólívar, the great liberator of South America and at one time the ruler of half the continent. His people now abhor him; only a few trusted aides attend to him as he drifts in a ship down the Magdalena. He slips in and out of delirium, recalling both his grandeur and infamies. 
 

Patriarch tells of a dictator who was once the salvation his nation sought, but became an insufferable autocrat, and reigned forever until his death, leaving a rotting body for the vultures because no one dared to touch it. 

As India stands at the threshold of an election, a Márquez comment assumes unusual significance. The dying Patriarch discovers: “A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, …[and he was] condemned to decipher the seams and straighten the threads of … of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting … that the only livable life was one of show.”