2024-03-06 11:34:11
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García Márquez’s family decided to publish the novel ten years following his death.
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- Author, Santiago Vanegas
- Scroll, BBC News World
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2 hours
It is a short novel, 122 pages, that follows Ana Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman who has been happily married for 27 years and has no reason to want to escape the life she has built. However, every August she travels to visit her mother’s grave on an island and for one night she becomes a different person.
This Wednesday it arrived in bookstores around the world.
Gabriel García Márquez worked long and intensely on it, but the process was interrupted by the deterioration of his memory. In the years before he died, he himself discarded it. “This book doesn’t work. “We must destroy it,” he said.
However, his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo decided to rescue it from the archive of the University of Texas at Austin and publish it when the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death approaches.
“My theory is that when he said it didn’t work he had lost the ability to judge it. It is not as polished as his other novels, but it is not a disaster that cannot be understood either. I think it was him who no longer understood anything,” Rodrigo García told the press.
Cristóbal Pera, editorial director of Planeta Unidos, worked with García Márquez while he was alive on “In August See You” and was also the editor of the final version of the book.
In an interview with BBC Mundo, Pera tells behind the scenes of the book, which many describe as the literary event of the year.
image copyrightRicardo Trabulsi
Caption,
Cristóbal Pera, editorial director of Planeta Unidos, with Gabriel García Márquez.
How did you come to work on “In August See You” and what was your relationship with García Márquez like in that process?
I was García Márquez’s editor since 2001, when I collaborated in the editing of his memoirs, “Vivir para narrala.” There began a distance editor-author relationship, which later when I went to Mexico in 2006 we resumed in person. I had an ongoing relationship with him in the edition of “I did not come to say a speech”, the book that collects all of his speeches that was published in 2010.
And finally, as I mention in the editor’s note that is in the book, García Márquez’s agent, Carmen Balcells, asked me in 2010 to encourage him to finish his novel “In August See You,” regarding which I had no news. .
So, when I returned to Mexico I told him regarding it. He had already finished a first draft in 2004.
At that time, 2010 and 2011, I was already starting to lose my memory a little and I wasn’t really working on the novel. But he was dedicated to correcting a word, a phrase, to improve it, and there his genius shone, in those small corrections.
I was able to read three or four of the chapters of the novel out loud with him in front of me, and I loved it. I saw that the topic was also unprecedented for him, with a protagonist who had not been seen in his narrative.
And he continued taking notes on a fifth version that he had among the versions he had been making until he finally gave it up as his illness progressed.
What happened to the novel following García Márquez’s death in 2014?
After his death, the family decided that it was not the time to publish that novel, which he had also said he did not want to publish in his last years.
All of García Márquez’s papers, including this manuscript, came to the University of Texas at Austin to become the great García Márquez archive. This novel was not available to the public at first, but some people were able to see it.
After seeing that some people had had access to the manuscript and had said that it was very good and that it should be published, García Márquez’s children finally decided to ignore their father and publish it. And that’s when they ask me to work on the final edition of the novel.
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“This novel was part of a narrative project,” says García Márquez’s editor.
Beyond discarding it in his last years, what relationship had García Márquez had with this novel? What vision did he have of it?
This novel was part of a narrative project.
In an interview he gives in Madrid when he reads the first chapter of this novel in public, he tells the journalist that he is writing a series of short novels with the general theme of love in middle age. “Of Love and Other Demons” was part of that.
Then, when he returned home in 2002 following suffering from cancer in Los Angeles, he took up the manuscript of what would later become “Memories of My Sad Whores,” and finished it in a year and it was published.
And then he dedicates a whole year to working on the draft he already had of “See you in August.”
Then he sends a manuscript to the Balcells agency, and that is the fifth version that he abandons, abandons in the sense of letting it rest, as he tells his secretary Mónica Alonso. García Márquez’s secretary is essential. She is the one who helped him and who kept the manuscripts.
In his last years, when his memory was failing him and he did not recognize many things, he mentioned several times that he did not want to publish the novel, that it was not ready, etc.
But, well, as the children say in the introduction of the book, the novel was not polished, but it was finished, readers will see. I didn’t have to add a word, of course. I don’t even have to say that I haven’t added anything.
What details can you tell regarding the book editing process? What challenges did you encounter?
The biggest challenge was absolute respect for García Márquez’s work. It is a task of immense responsibility.
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to work a lot with him side by side, so I knew his work very well, I had worked with him on corrections, I knew how he worked and that helped me.
The most important thing was to read the complete manuscript and see that the story was there complete, finished. There was nothing to do there to finish anything nor did you have to add a sentence or an ending, it was all there.
I have done the job of editor with the manuscript that was in a Word document and the fifth version that was printed with many handwritten notes in the margins, with changes, with things. That is where I base the editing to arrive at the final text.
You just had to follow the clues he left to make the decision to, for example, delete a phrase that was crossed out.
And then, what I did have to make were some changes that came from verifying data such as names of authors mentioned, the normal work of an editor, and some questions of coherence of the text itself.
image copyrightMónica Alonso
Caption,
“It is a task of immense responsibility,” says Pera.
What do you mean by coherence issues?
There are a couple of examples that I mention in the editor’s note. In the novel, the protagonist ends the last chapter at the end at 50 years old, so, doing the math, in the first chapter she is 46 years old.
The point is that, in the first chapter, he describes the protagonist as a woman close to seniority, and he himself marks that phrase and puts a question mark on it. Obviously she was from an early version and he realizes that, of course, a 46-year-old woman is not close to what we understand by old age.
There, as an editor, simply interpreting that mark of his, I remove that reference to the elderly, and the reader is not confused, because she is a 46-year-old woman.
Another example is that the protagonist meets a man in the first chapter, and in the last chapter, years later, she meets him once more on a street in a coastal city, and she does not recognize him at first because he says he has a mustache. that he wasn’t wearing it when he met him. And in the first chapter, the man does appear with a mustache.
They are purely questions of narrative coherence that he would have seen in a final review. So, the mention of the mustache had to be removed from that first chapter for that final reference to make sense.
My interventions have been these: follow all their marks and simply control the narrative coherence of the ages, the chronology, the names, etc., etc.
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What does this book represent in García Márquez’s literature and what does it show regarding the end of his career?
The readers will be the ones to judge “See you in August.” I believe that this novel closes its entire narrative with a flourish. And I think deep down he was aware of that.
It is a novel with a female protagonist, unlike any of his novels. And women are very important in his novels since One Hundred Years of Solitude and in all his stories, but they have never had a leading role like that of Ana Magdalena Bach, who is a woman who decides to explore her sexuality and her freedom.
This causes conflicts, but she continues on that path, although she is a woman who is theoretically happy and would have no objective reasons to do so.
That is why it is a novel that his son Rodrigo himself has described as feminist. I think that this novel rearranges all of García Márquez’s work and especially the role of women in it, which following this novel has to be reconsidered. I think that’s why it’s so important.
Then, in its style, in how it is told, it takes place in an unnamed place and time, probably in the 80s or 90s on the coast of Colombia on an island, but it is not really known. He doesn’t want to leave strict marks of where he is from, which is a novelty.
It is then a work that does justice to the others…
Definitely. But what I say is of no use, because readers from now on will be able to judge it.
I can only go back to when I first read several chapters of the novel aloud with him. At that moment what I thought was that I hope one day all of García Márquez’s readers might enjoy the masterpiece that he had the privilege of reading for the first time.
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