Gabriel Garca Mrquez's Sons Publish Novel the Author Wanted to Destroy

[Judi Lynn]

The famed novelist had instructed his family never to publish drafts of “Until August,” written as he struggled with dementia during his final years

Sonja Anderson
Daily Correspondent

March 13, 2024 2:45 p.m.



Writer Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 at the age of 87. Ulf Andersen / Getty Images

As author Gabriel García Márquez was suffering from dementia, he told his two sons that the novel he’d been working on was not for the public’s eyes: “This book doesn’t work,” he said. “It must be destroyed.”
Now, a decade after García Márquez’s death in 2014, his sons have had that book published. The slim novel, titled Until August, is available for purchase worldwide.

As Gonzalo García Barcha, one of the sons, tells the BBC’s “Front Row” radio program, he and his brother Rodrigo read a version of the novel in 2022. It was embedded in 769 pages of drafts and notes, housed in the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. The brothers came to their decision quickly.

“We realized that the book was complete,” says García Barcha. “We realized that we didn’t have to do a lot of editing. We did think about it for about three seconds—was it a betrayal to my parents, to my father’s [wishes]?”

He adds: “We decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that’s what children are for.”



Gonzalo García Barcha, one of Gabriel García Márquez's sons, publicizes the launch of Until August, or En Agosto nos Vemos, at a press conference in Madrid. Isabel Infantes / Getty Images

Born in Colombia in 1927, García Márquez (who was sometimes called Gabo) was a Nobel Prize winner and pioneering magical realist best known for his novels One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). “A surreal quality, a rendering of the improbable and impossible as real, pervades his work,” as William Kennedy wrote in the Atlantic in 1973.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/gabriel-garcia-marquezs-sons-betray-the-author-by-publishing-a-draft-of-his-last-novel-180983927/