Just before he died, Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner in literature, began a novel about a woman in midlife called Ana Magdalena Bach. Every August, she travels to a Caribbean island, where her mother insisted that she be buried. The daughter puts flowers on the grave, gladiolus, and stays the night in a hotel. There she meets a man, a new one, every year. This chance meeting, or the longing for such a meeting, put her normal life on the mainland with her husband and daughter in jeopardy. Shouldn’t life have more to offer than this? Mysterious stranger When references to classical music also appear, this story begins to resemble another small book written by another Nobel Prize winner, which was published earlier this year. A middle-aged Spanish-speaking woman also played the main role in “The Pole” by the South African writer JM Cotzee. A sudden, accidental love meeting was also the theme there. I wonder if this is a secret message from these old authors. Is the sudden, overwhelming love with “A Tall Dark Stranger” the only thing worth writing (home) about when you’re standing on the edge of the grave? Should have shelved But I can no longer look for connections between these stories, written by Nobel Prize winners towards the end of their lives. When Cotzee published his elaborate and amusing narrative, he was still in his full five years (we are allowed to believe). Marquez passed away in 2014. “See you in August” was actually supposed to be one of several stories about Ana Magdalena Bach. But García Márquez, who by this time had developed dementia, himself believed that what he had written was not up to the mark, and asked the publisher and the heirs to scrap the project. How it happened that this nevertheless became a book in the end, the book’s editor tells about in a circumstantial and talkative afterword. NOBEL PRIZE WINNER: Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, and has sold over 40 million books worldwide. Here from 1968, the year after his perhaps most famous book “Hundre års ensomhet” was published. Photo: NTB Many men Authors are not always right when they assess the quality of their own work. If Max Brod had followed the call of his best friend Franz Kafka to burn his letters and notebooks, the world would have been a completely unique piece of world literature poorer. But in this case, Gabriel García Márquez was right – it doesn’t count. The woman in this story checks up on so many men that it becomes difficult to separate them from each other. We didn’t get to know her family on the mainland either. The clichés stand, if not in a queue, then they appear at regular intervals when those involved get ready to “give themselves over to bottomless happiness” in the various hotel rooms. Publisher Kaja Rindal Bakkejord must take his share of the responsibility for moss-grown words and expressions like this: Shouldn’t have been published The fact that the book also has something of the Caribbean feel that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books are otherwise blessed with is rather an argument for return to the central works in the authorship. “For me, memory is both raw material and tool at the same time. Without it, I have nothing,” Marquez told his children. Then it is more than surprising that the descendants would publish something the father wrote when he was suffering from advanced dementia. news reports Photo: Gyldendal Title: “Vi ses i August” Original title: “En agosto nos vemos” Author: Gabriel García Márquez Genre: Novel Translator: Kaja Rindal Bakkejord Published: 6 March 2024 Publisher: Gyldendal ISBN: 9788205596542 Number of pages: 111
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“See you in August” by Gabriel García Márquez – Reviews and recommendations
